For three hours last Thursday, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut down cell phone service in four stations, prior to a planned political demonstration protesting the fatal shooting of a homeless man by a BART police officer.
But instead of avoiding bad publicity over the shooting death, BART's cell phone censorship has drawn even more attention to the agency and has called into question the legality of its actions.
By Sarah Roberts, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 12:55pm
After the Supreme Court ruled the police cannot attach a GPS device to a suspect's car to track them, law enforcement is trying to use cell phone location data to get the same information.
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 1:17pm
The ACLU has released the results of our public records requests to hundreds of police departments asking about their cell phone tracking policies.What we have learned is disturbing.
By Sarah Roberts, Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 8:34pm
Even after January's landmark Supreme Court decision cast significant doubt on the government’s ability to electronically track a person’s location without a warrant, the Justice Department continues to defend this practice. On Friday, the ACLU, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, arguing that the government should be required to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing 60 days’ worth of location information generated by an individual’s cell phone.
By Allie Bohm, Advocacy & Policy Strategist, ACLU at 9:57am
For the past year, the ACLU has been gathering information on local law enforcement agencies’ use of cell phone location tracking. (We’ve written about what we’ve learned here, here, here, here, and here.) In addition to everything we’ve discovered about location tracking itself, we’ve also learned about a number of other techniques law enforcement and the telcos can use when they work together. Sometimes the information came to light because, as with this telecom data retention chart, the information on the other techniques was mingled with the information on cell phone location tracking. Sometimes it was because law enforcement agencies misunderstood our public records requests and sent us everything they had related to telephones.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:33pm
A gathering of cyber-crime specialists in Massachusetts last week provided a glimpse into the tactics used by prosecutors and police to access digital data. Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts has done a nice writeup of the conference. As she points out, the event was closed to the press and the public, but the schedule of events was posted online, and included sessions with titles such as:
By Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 8:19am
The Bay Area Rapid Transit System (“BART,” for short) has a serious public relations problem. BART Police have been involved in three fatal shootings of BART passengers in the past three years, including the Oscar Grant incident in 2009, in which an unarmed African-American New Year’s Eve reveler was shot in the back while lying face-down on a BART platform by a white police officer who later testified that he meant to use his taser, not his pistol. The shooting, and the controversial verdict in the criminal trial of the BART police officer, spurred widespread protests.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:13pm
CTIA, the industry association representing wireless phone carriers, is opposing proposed California legislation that would require the police to get a warrant before accessing a person’s location records from a cellphone company.
The association opposes the warrant requirement, and also opposes a requirement that carriers publicly disclose how often and why they share information with law enforcement.
