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Supreme Court to Decide Whether Government Make Can Seize Your Cell Phone Location Records w/o A Warrant

From [HERE] The question to be answered by the Supreme Court regarding privacy is "Whether the warrantless seizure and search of historical cell phone records revealing the location and movements of a cell phone user over the course of 127 days is permitted by the Fourth Amendment." The petition was filed by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation on August 7, 2017. The case was filed is asking the court to reverse the judgement of the Sixth Circuit Court. You could review the full brief filed with the court here.

According to a new report posted today, a 44-page amicus brief was filed and signed by more than a dozen prominent tech companies such as Apple, Verizon, Facebook, Google and others.

The report further noted that "Cell phone location data has become increasingly important to investigations in recent years, as it can pinpoint a suspect's location by triangulating the signal among cell towers. Cell phone companies regularly get requests from police and other government agencies tied to investigations.

The issue is central to the appeal filed by Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted in 2011 of a series of armed robberies in Ohio and Michigan with the help of past cell phone location data. Officers dug through 127 days' worth of data provided by MetroPCS and Sprint. From that, they pulled together about 12,898 different locations for Carpenter during the time of the robberies.

Carpenter's conviction hinged on his cell phone location data, and he lost an appeal at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last April. In the appellate decision, the judges ruled that cell phone location data didn't merit Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and that the officers didn't need a warrant, as Carpenter's lawyers argued."

At times I'm finding it very difficult to understand this left wing thinking that illegals should be protected over U.S. citizens in Sanctuary cities and States refusing to assist ICE in capturing criminals that should be deported.

In the case noted above, criminals were captured due to being able to track their cell phone records for their location data. It served to throw criminals in jail and yet tech companies and the ACLU don't like that criminals could be caught. The only ones that would want this reversed are criminals. Regular citizens who don't break the law couldn't care less but would be glad that criminals be taken off the street by the government having the tools to do their job.

I know that those on the left will scream this, that and the other thing about privacy, but giving criminals new rights is simply insane. I'm hoping that the Supreme court doesn't overturn a reasonable judgement of revealing a limited 127 days of location history to law enforcement.