On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the case for
privacy in the digital age, declining to decide if police require search
warrants to examine cellphone location information by a wireless carrier. All
of the nine justices turned away an appeal which was filed by a man from
Florida, Quartavious Davis, who was initially convicted of participating in a
string of 2010 robberies in Miami and was sentenced to 162 years of
imprisonment.
Later, Davis challenged the conviction in the part because
police didn’t seek a warrant when asking the cellphone provider, MetroPCS
Communications Inc., for location information that further linked him to 7 more
crime scenes from August to October 2010.
Davis challenged the Supreme Court’s decision after the 11th
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this May. The appeal further stated that the
failure to obtain a warrant didn’t violate Davis’ right to be free from
unreasonable searches. Furthermore, the information that law enforcement
agencies can readily obtain from wireless carriers that depict where local
users connect at a time that they make a call. This will inevitably help the
police to investigate if the suspect was in the vicinity of the crime scene or
not.
Similar cases where objection was raised regarding companies
protecting their privacy rights are still pending in the lower courts. Lately,
the four major wireless carriers, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, have
received thousands of requests from the law enforcement for what is known as
“cell site location information,” or CSLI.
Davi’s lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union defended him by saying that police require “probable cause” and also a warrant so as to avoid constitutionally unreasonable searches. But based on a provision of the Federal Stored Communication Act, the government stated it doesn’t need any specific cause to obtain customer records. Instead, it declared that prosecutors will have to show their “reasonable grounds” for the record and further investigation.
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