[KrisKrinkle]

I still can't figure out how my relationship with my bank or with my phone company has three "parties", and how my bank or my phone company is some distant "third party" and not the second party in that very tight relationship. That sleight of hand has enabled all of this warrantless searching.

Can somebody help me out here? Who's the "second party", if not the phone company?

From the Original Post:

The other addresses a person’s expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties. See United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435 (no expectation of privacy in financial records held by a bank), and Smith, 442 U. S. 735 (no expectation of privacy in records of dialed telephone numbers conveyed to telephone company). Pp. 7–10.

Looks like in one case, the second party is whomever you did business with through the bank, for instance if you wrote a check or used a debit card to make a legal or illegal purchase and in the other case, the second party is whomever you called, whomever you "dialed up" using the phone company's service.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

historic cell-site data

Is there such a thing as "non-historic" data? Like they might have a method of collecting future data?

[jiggyboy]

That’s the thing — I would think that business, not the phone company or the bank, is the third party. Before I made my first phone call (re: Smith vs Maryland), was the phone company already the “third party”? Who was already the second party in that case? They’re not trying to get records from the hundred “third party” people I called, they’re trying to get records from the phone company, whom they’re pretending to be some legally distant “third party”. These are the questions that have been vexing me for quite some time.