A federal magistrate has ruled that information pulled from cellphone towers provides such an intimate portrait of a customer's life that government investigators must get a warrant before obtaining it.
The ruling by Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the US District Court for Eastern New York is a major victory for civil liberties advocates, who have long warned that so-called historical cell-site information gives the government the ability to track users' location each time they make a call or send a text message. It follows an appeals court decision earlier this month that a drug trafficking suspect's constitutional rights were violated when the FBI surreptitiously attached a global positioning system to his car without a warrant.
The ruling in that case, known as US v. Maynard, weighed heavily in Orenstein's reasoning.
“The decision in Maynard is just one of several rulings in recent years reflecting a growing recognition, at least in some courts, that technology has progressed to a point where a person who wishes to partake in the social, cultural, and political affairs of our society has no realistic choice but to expose to others, if not to the public as a whole, a broad range of conduct and communications that would previously have been deemed unquestionably private,” he wrote.
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