“We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights ofordinary Americans …” [President Bill Clinton, ‘USA Today’ March 11,1993: Page 2A]
Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbersknown as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texasbanks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companiescorresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time ofa dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminousrecords showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt andCorey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phonesthousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, andfederal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. OnFriday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hearoral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.
In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantlesstracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonableexpectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cellphones’–whereabouts.
U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s FourthAmendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to thegovernment its own records” that show where a mobile device placed andreceived calls.