By Mariko Hirose, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:22pm
Today, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals decided (PDF) — in the first appellate opinion to address the issue — that the Stored Communications Act (SCA) protects historical cell phone location information from disclosure to the government, and that under the SCA, magistrate judges may order the government to obtain a warrant before accessing such information. In this decision, the court recognized that information about people's past whereabouts can implicate privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment because, for example, it may reveal details of what is happening inside of the privacy of the home.
By Mariko Hirose, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:15pm
A few weeks ago, we wrote about United States v. Maynard, a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring the government to obtain a warrant when it uses a GPS tracking device to monitor someone's movements.
Last Friday, Judge James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York recognized that Maynard's reasoning also applies when the government tries to retrace a person's whereabouts using historical cell phone location information stored by cell phone carriers. Judge Orenstein rejected each possible factual difference between GPS vehicle tracking and historical cell phone tracking, and concluded that cell phone tracking is just as intrusive to Americans' reasonable expectations of privacy in the details of their everyday lives as GPS tracking.
By Mariko Hirose, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:39pm
Last Friday, the district court in the Western District of Washington granted the motion to intervene that the ACLU filed on behalf of our clients in the lawsuit (PDF) challenging the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s (DOR) repeated requests for Amazon’s customer records in the course of its tax audit of Amazon. These customer records reveal highly personal and intimate details of people’s lives that DOR does not actually need for its tax audit, including what books people are reading, what films they are watching, and what other private and expressive materials they are purchasing. The First Amendment bars the government from demanding and collecting this information.
By Mariko Hirose, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:24pm
On Friday, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided (PDF) that the Fourth Amendment requires the government to obtain a warrant when it uses a GPS tracking device to monitor someone's movements for an extended period of time. The court held that we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the sum of our movements over time, recognizing that continuous surveillance reveals a highly intimate picture of a person's life — for example, "whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."
Today, the ACLU, the