US Supreme Court judges leave warrantless monitoring of mobile phone position in the 'legal' status
Wired seems to be the major story-breaker on the Supreme Court’s decision on warrant-less GPS tracking.
§The Decision
Many people mis-read what the decision was. The many misconstrued angles included idea that the major dimension of this case was the ruling itself: without a warrant, you cannot track a person by attaching a GPS to their car. Far mor important dimensions exist to this case, as ‘the rest of it’ is the real danger to civil liberties. “The minority,” Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan, think that the government should be able to monitor GPS system data…. regardless of where it comes from. That’s where they think differently than “the majority,” Scalia, Kennedy, Sotomayor, Thomas and Roberts.
§“Warrantless” is still legal
The majority thinks a problem exists warrantless GPS installations. ProTip: an “installation” means a situation wherein a GPS device is attached to a car….. it doesn’t address when a car.. or any piece of person property… already has a GPS system integrated. “The majority” think that the following two warrantless GPS monitoring situations are legal:
- Where a car has a pre-installed GPS
- by logical extension, any device that has built-in GPS
quote:
The majority said “the present case does not require us to answer” whether police may employ GPS monitoring of a vehicle via an already onboard navigation system “without an accompanying trespass”
Remember, again, that whether you have rights over your vehicle’s position data is based upon a couple things, including:
- that it is your private property, and
- whether you naturally transmit your data to other parties.
If the latter case applies, the Judges assert that you no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
§Sotomayor goes on record about cell phones
Here’s what Sotomayor had to say about cell phones:
More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. E.g., Smith, 442 U. S., at 742; United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435, 443 (1976). This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” post, at 10, and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.
§The Real Problem Here is Mobile Phones
Phones are personal property and, for purposes of this case, are identical to a car (just a smaller size). Doubtlessly this is why the judges are mum. They had the balls to go up against the FBI on this one, but mobile-phone tracking is a beast that is yet beyond them. We can give them the credit that whether personal data is a matter of personal privacy still eludes the public consciousness and US law. Other countries are quite concerned with personal privacy, so the precedent of outrage is ont based in the US. GPS data, from devices that are naturally installed or integrated with and individual’s property, transmit data that is not wholly-owned by them. Rights barely exist to protect this data from being sold to corporate 3rd parties, let alone preventing it from reaching government demands.
§Considerations
Proper law would define any data that is generated because of a person to be their private property unless otherwise assigned. Such law would need to go hand-in-hand with corporations supporting individual privacy rights by not force-snatching private data in a mafioso monopoly. Then, the search of a person’s GPS data would constitute a breach of their private property, and therefore their rights. How is the US President’s mobile data protected? Is it different cryptographically, or by the network that it runs on? Why cannot each person have the same rights of data privacy?
