I haven’t blogged recently on judicial decisions considering the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment. As regular readers will recall, the “mosaic theory” is a term for the idea that long-term monitoring of a suspect can be a Fourth Amendment search even if short-term monitoring is not. Under this approach, which was suggested by the […]
Archive | Cell-Site Information
Two District Court Rulings That Cell-Site Data Not Protected Under the Fourth Amendment
On Tuesday, DOJ filed a brief in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in United States v. Antoine Jones, on remand from the Supreme Court, on the question of whether cell-site location information is protected under the Fourth Amendment. It’s a good brief, I think, and I was particularly intrigued by […]
Looking into the Record of United States v. Skinner, the Sixth Circuit Phone Location Case
By Orin Kerr on August 17, 2012 2:53 am in Cell-Site Information, Fourth Amendment, GPS Surveillance
I recently blogged about United States v. Skinner, the new Sixth Circuit decision concluding that the Fourth Amendment does not protect location information obtained from a cell phone. Skinner has been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere, in part because the facts are so vague, so decided to take a closer look at […]
Are Historical Cell-Site Data Protected Under the Fourth Amendment After United States v. Jones?
No, concludes Judge Bennett in United States v. Graham (District of Maryland, March 1, 2012). Judge Bennett concludes that historical cell-site records are not protected because they fall under the third-party doctrine: Like the bank records at issue in [United States v.] Miller, the historical cell site location records in this case are not the […]
Court Rules That Police Cannot Use Warrants to Obtain Cell Phone Location of Person Who is Subject of Arrest Warrant
Imagine the police have an arrest warrant for a crime suspect, and they want to find the suspect to arrest him. They happen to know the suspect’s cell phone number, so they want to go to the phone company and have the phone company tell the police the location of the suspect’s phone. The phone […]
Third Circuit Rules That Magistrate Judges Have Discretion to Reject non-Warrant Court Order Applications and Require Search Warrants to Obtain Historical Cell-Site Records
A while back, I blogged at length about the Third Circuit’s pending case involving government access to historical cell-site records. The issue in the case is what legal standard the government must satisfy to obtain orders requiring phone companies to disclose such information. The district court had ruled that a warrant was required, and the […]