Tennessee law enforcement may soon need a warrant before tracking the whereabouts of a suspect’s cell phone.Montana and Maine were charter members of the club of legislatures requiring warrants for cell-phone location data (in New Jersey and Massachusetts, their high courts imposed similar requirements), and this spring two more jurisdictions passed similar bills through the legislative process:
The Tennessee General Assembly recently passed a bill that bans “a governmental entity or law enforcement agency from obtaining the location information of an electronic device without a search warrant except under certain circumstances.”
As of Monday, the bill was listed as ready to be signed by the speaker of the House and the speaker of the Senate. From there, the bill will be ready for Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam.
In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe approved a bill requiring that law enforcement obtain a warrant before tracking the location of a cell phone; the law also takes effect July 1.RELATED: The Next NSA? Police departments under scrutiny for phone, license plate surveillance
Real-time location tracking without a warrant is not the only area state lawmakers are looking to rein in law enforcement agencies.
Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert signed a bill into law March 31 banning the admission of electronic data collected without a warrant in criminal court proceedings.
The law takes effect July 1.
Tennessee law enforcement may soon need a warrant before tracking the whereabouts of a suspect’s cell phone.
The Tennessee General Assembly recently passed a bill that bans “a governmental entity or law enforcement agency from obtaining the location information of an electronic device without a search warrant except under certain circumstances.”
As of Monday, the bill was listed as
ready to be signed by the speaker of the House and the speaker of the
Senate. From there, the bill will be ready for Tennessee Gov. Bill
Haslam.
- See more at: http://tennessee.watchdog.org/2014/05/02/tn-ban-on-warrantless-cell-phone-tracking-awaits-governors-signature/#sthash.bDbFdOPq.dpuf
The Tennessee General Assembly recently passed a bill that bans “a governmental entity or law enforcement agency from obtaining the location information of an electronic device without a search warrant except under certain circumstances.”
GET A WARRANT: Police in Tennessee may soon have to obtain a warrant to track the location of a suspect’s cell phone.
- See more at: http://tennessee.watchdog.org/2014/05/02/tn-ban-on-warrantless-cell-phone-tracking-awaits-governors-signature/#sthash.bDbFdOPq.dpuf
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3 comments:
Great news. Now if we can find a politician in Texas with a spine we can follow suit. I am amazed how may sealed warrants are issued.
Actually, Bryan Hughes from Mineola fought hard for a similar bill last session, getting 107 joint and co-authors and passing it as an amendment 126-4 when the leadership wouldn't give it a floor vote.
If the NSA scandal had come out 2 months earlier, it would have passed easily. That bill was just a tiny bit ahead of its time. Impossible to predict the future, but IMO it's got a great chance to make it through the process next spring.
These are toothless laws because police can ask the feds for help, and collect whatever they want from the FBI or DEA/ATF. DEA for decades has illegally tapped phones, then tipped off local police. Everytime you read one of those stories about local police 'randomly' discovering a drug stash during a so-called routine traffic stop it wasn't random or routine at all. All of this has been documented already in Wired, Schneier's blog on security, and a Glen Greenwald story on DEA using parallel reconstruction to avoid laws meant to limit police powers.
Also notice the wording of these bills, they don't include "metadata" which can be legally accessed by anybody from a telecom without a warrant and used to find phone locations if you know anything about data science and can crunch big data with a perl script.
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