Free Republic

The Supreme Court on Wednesday morning will hear arguments in a major privacy controversy about police tracking people through their cellphones that may bring about permanent changes to how the courts interpret the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. At issue in Carpenter v. United States is the constitutionality of police's warrantless search and seizure of a cellphone user’s records to uncover that person’s location and movements. The government obtained location data in 2011 on Timothy Carpenter, a suspected criminal in Detroit, without getting a warrant. Carpenter appealed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the government did not need...

“The privacy of emails, photos stored in the cloud, even heart rate history from a smartwatch could be at stake, according to civil libertarians, as the Supreme Court takes up a potential blockbuster case after Thanksgiving. When they return to the bench after the holiday, the justices will weigh whether the history of cell phone locations stored by a phone service provider is searchable without a warrant. The case, Carpenter v. U.S., centers on Timothy Carpenter, who argues the government violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his cell phone location records from MetroPCS...

Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves. FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually...