Texas judge says warrantless cellphone tracking violates Fourth Amendment, saga continues

Rev up the bureaucratic turbines, because a judge in Texas has determined that warrantless cellphone tracking is indeed unconstitutional. In a short lived decision issued earlier this month, US District Judge Lynn N. Hughes of the Southern District of Texas argued that seizing cellphone records with no search warrant constitutes a contravention of the Fourth Amendment. “The records would show the date, time, called number, and placement of the phone when the decision was made,” Judge Hughes wrote within the ruling, linked below. “These data are constitutionally shielded from this intrusion.” The call is available in response to an earlier ruling issued last year by Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith, also of the Southern District of Texas. If so, Judge Smith argued against unwarranted wiretapping on similarly constitutional grounds, stating that with today’s tracking technology, every aspect of a suspect’s life may be “imperceptibly captured, compiled, and retrieved from a digital dossier somewhere in a pc cloud.”

The government appealed Judge Smith’s ruling in view that the Fourth Amendment wouldn’t apply to cellphone tracking, because “a customer has no privacy interest in business records held by a mobile phone provider, as they aren’t the customer’s private papers.” Judge Hughes’ decision, however, effectively overrules this appeal. “When the govt requests records from cellular services, data disclosing the position of the phone on the time of particular calls can be acquired only by a warrant issued on probable cause,” Judge Hughes wrote. “The usual under [today's law] is below that required by the Constitution.” The law in question, needless to say, is the Stored Communications Act — a law bundled under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which permits investigators to acquire electronic records and not using a warrant. This month’s decision implicitly demands this law to be reconsidered or revised, though it’s certainly not the one ruling to challenge it , and it likely won’t be the last , either.