Major Cell Phone Privacy Case on 3rd Circuit Docket This Week
A closely watched privacy rights case is before the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which this week will hear arguments about the proper legal standard to apply when prosecutors seek cell phone location data.
The global positioning data, recorded regularly whenever a cell phone is turned on, track the whereabouts and the comings and goings of every cell phone user.
At issue is what standard—“reasonable grounds” or “probable cause”—prosecutors need to show in order to obtain the data.
The Justice Department falls on the “reasonable grounds” side and maintains it only needs to show that the records are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation,” the Legal Intelligencer reports.
However in 2008, U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan in Pittsburgh issued a 52-page opinion that said the prosecutors must meet the “probable cause” standard.
“This court believes that citizens continue to hold a reasonable expectation of privacy in the information the government seeks regarding their physical movements/locations—even now that such information is routinely produced by their cell phones—and that, therefore, the government’s investigatory search of such information continues to be protected by the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement,” the magistrate opined.
The Intelligencer notes that the 3rd Circuit is the first federal appellate court to take on the issue, which pits the DOJ against privacy and civil liberties advocates from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union.
