Supreme Court agrees to rule if cops need warrant for cell-site data #ScrewThirdPartyDoctrine

Down with "third-party" doctrine! With everything going to "the cloud", it makes your whole life discoverable AND, as of right now, without a warrant!

Supreme Court agrees to rule if cops need warrant for cell-site data | Ars Technica: "The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide its biggest privacy dispute in years, a case that asks whether the authorities need a probable-cause court warrant to access people's mobile phone location history. "Because cell phone location records can reveal countless private details of our lives, police should only be able to access them by getting a warrant based on probable cause," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The time has come for the Supreme Court to make clear that the longstanding protections of the Fourth Amendment apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records." FURTHER READING Supreme Court asked to rule if cops need warrant for cell-site data For years, the authorities have been obtaining data pinpointing the cell towers that a suspect's mobile phone pinged—all without a warrant. That information is then used as evidence showing a suspect's past whereabouts. In the case before the justices, the authorities got 127 days of cell-site information that included 12,898 location points as part of a Detroit robbery investigation. Police can get this information without a warrant because of the so-called third-party doctrine. That's a legal theory allowing the government to demand companies to provide private information on people if that information is considered a normal business record. Because cell-site data is deemed a business record of the mobile phone companies, the telcos are required to disclose it as part of government investigations, without a probable-cause warrant."

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