US authorities can track cellphones without warrant: Judge
Iran Press TV
Fri May 17, 2013 12:32PM GMT
A federal judge in the US has ruled that law enforcement agents can track people's cellphones without a warrant.
“Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off,” New York Magistrate Judge Gary Brown wrote recently, Russia Today reported on Friday.
The rights group American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has denounced Brown's decision as “ridiculous.”
Chris Soghoian, a principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the ACLU, issued a statement saying, “There is a big difference between location information you knowingly share with a select group of friends (or, in fact, the world) and information collected about you without your knowledge or consent.”
In July 2012, official figures indicated that US cellphone carriers encountered a dramatic spike in requests by law enforcement authorities for cellphone subscribers’ information including callers’ locations, text messages and call logs.
In response to a congressional investigation into cellphone surveillance, cellphone companies said they had received more than 1.3 million requests from US law enforcement agencies for consumers’ cellphone records during 2011.
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