Court Says Police Can Track Suspects via Cellphone without Warrant

By emeadows
August 16, 2012

In a 2-1 ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, it was ruled that law enforcement “has the right to obtain location data from a cellphone in order to track a suspect without a warrant,” reports Ars Technica.
In the case, an accused drug trafficker named Melvin Skinner claimed that the government’s use of GPS location information retrieved from his phone was a “warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
“There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured pay-as-you-go cell phone,” wrote Judge John Rogers. “If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.”
Judge Rogers referenced the 2012 Jones v. United States case, in which it was decided by the Supreme Court that law enforcement could not warrantlessly place GPS tracking devices on a suspect’s vehicle. He made the distinction that in this case, “no such physical intrusion occurred.”
“Here, the monitoring of the location of the contraband-carrying vehicle as it crossed the country is no more of a comprehensively invasive search than if instead the car was identified in Arizona and then tracked visually and the search handed off from one local authority to another as the vehicles progressed,” Rogers wrote.

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