How Easy Is It For The Police To Get GPS Data From Your Phone?
December 9, 2009 by Dissent
Filed under Surveillance
Justin Elliot has more on the issue of how easy it is — or isn’t — for law enforcement to obtain your GPS data. The issue grabbed a lot of attention last week after graduate student Chris Soghoian published some information suggesting that Sprint had gotten 8 million requests last year for customer data. Sprint later responded that 8 million did not refer to unique customers or accounts, but to pings.
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Depending on the circumstances, police would generally need to meet one of three tiers of standards to get a court order to access to GPS data from a phone company, Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School, tells TPMmuckraker: a certification to the court that the location information is relevant to an investigation (a court must grant this request); showing the court with “specific and articulable facts” — say, that a suspect is involved in drug smuggling — that the data is relevant; or, finally, showing good old probable cause to obtain a search warrant.
“Under a legal standard like this one, people who will never do anything wrong — who have simply caught the interest of law enforcement — will have their GPS info pulled,” says Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the ACLU. Adds Calabrese: “GPS data should clearly be protected by the Fourth Amendment warrant standard, but right now it’s not.”
Read more on TPMMuckraker.