Federal Court Says Warrants Are Needed To Grab GPS Data From Third-Party Tracking Services
from the seems-like-an-obvious-extension-of-Carpenter dept
In 2012, the Supreme Court decided that GPS tracking devices require warrants. Notably, this wasn't because the GPS data was deserving of Fourth Amendment protections but because officers had to trespass on private property (a car parked in a driveway) to attach the device.
That left law enforcement with a lot a gray area in which to operate. Since there was no distinct finding that GPS data was protected, it could theoretically be harvested from third-party devices without a warrant. The Supreme Court's decision in the Carpenter case, however, appeared to extend protections to the records themselves. It declared the acquisition of cell site location info requires the use of the warrant, extending Fourth Amendment protections to third party records of people's movements. It could be argued this decision covers GPS data pulled from third party services, since it's basically the same thing: gathering records of a person's movements.
In a recent federal case [PDF], both of these Supreme Court decisions are in play. It appears law enforcement thought it had found a way to route around the Jones decision. Investigating a robbery, detectives approached the dealership that had sold the vehicle spotted at the scene of the crime. The dealership had installed a tracking device to make the car easier to find in case of a repo. This was the data detectives obtained without a warrant.
On March 29, 2017, Hinsdale detectives issued an alert “on multiple databases” seeking information about the Lexus. Id. at 3. On April 4, 2017, a Headers employee told one of the detectives that the Lexus was equipped with a GPS tracking device serviced by Air Assault Asset Track GPS Systems. The Headers employee gave the detective her login credentials for Air Assault’s website and authorized him to access “all the GPS records associated with the Devinn Adams/Lexus RX account.” The GPS records included historical data tracking the Lexus’s “movement and global position.”
Without first obtaining a warrant, the detective downloaded a spreadsheet containing GPS data for the period from March 1, 2017 through April 4, 2017. The spreadsheet sets forth time-stamped entries giving the Lexus’s approximate street address (usually at the block level, such as “5701-5799 S Campbell Ave, Chicago, IL, 60629”) each time it was turned on, approximately every five minutes while it was being driven, and each time it was parked. According to the detective, “[g]reater detail” beyond those approximate street addresses “c[ould] be extracted from the map points” using “the software program that manages the GPS data,” which allowed the detective to “narrow[]” each recorded location “to specific latitude and longitude way points.”
Tobias Diggs, the alleged driver, moved to suppress the evidence, stating that both the Jones and Carpenter decisions prohibited this information being obtained without a warrant. The government argued that neither decision mattered.
The government responds that acquiring the data was not a Fourth Amendment search because: (1) unlike in Jones, the police made no physical intrusion on the Lexus, Doc. 55 at 10-12; and (2) under the third-party doctrine, Diggs lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data because he voluntarily provided it to the third party (Headers) from which the police obtained it, id. at 5-10.
Wrong, says the court. This is exactly what's covered by these two decisions.
The GPS data at issue here fits squarely within the scope of the reasonable expectation of privacy identified by the Jones concurrences and reaffirmed in Carpenter. The GPS data provide “a precise, comprehensive record of [Diggs’s] public movements” over the course of a month.
It goes on to point out the data collected here is pretty much indistinguishable from the data at the heart of the Carpenter decision.
Applying the third-party doctrine to the GPS data here would require essentially the same extension of the doctrine that the Court rejected in Carpenter. Carpenter understood CSLI to present “many of the qualities of the GPS monitoring … considered in Jones”—both are “detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled”; both “provide[] an intimate window into a person’s life”; and, in the context of historical information, both provide a “tracking capacity [that] runs against everyone” without any need for the police to “know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual, or when.” Indeed, at the time of the search in Carpenter, CSLI was still “less precise than GPS information.” Accordingly, Carpenter compels the conclusion that, given the privacy concerns implicated by the “detailed and comprehensive record of [Diggs’s] movements” captured by the Lexus’s GPS tracker, “the fact that the [police] obtained the information from a third party does not overcome [Diggs’s] claim to Fourth Amendment protection.”
The government also tried to get the good faith exception applied. Given that this search occurred prior to the Carpenter decision, the government says the detectives had no reason to believe a warrant was needed. The court disagrees. The government can point to no prior cases specifically authorizing this sort of warrantless search. But more importantly, it reiterates that the Carpenter decision can -- and should -- be applied retroactively.
The Supreme Court could have described what it was doing in Carpenter, not as declining to extend the third-party doctrine to a context not addressed in Smith and Miller, but as partially scaling back the once-categorical doctrine to account for “the seismic shifts in digital technology” that gave rise to widespread, long-term location tracking. 138 S. Ct. at 2219. Had it done so, the Davis good-faith exception might very well have applied here. [...] But instead, the Court said that the third-party doctrine was never broad enough to encompass technology-enabled long-term location tracking in the first place.
[...]
Carpenter thus teaches that general statements of the third-party doctrine uttered in pre-Carpenter decisions not only do not cover CSLI, but never did. And as noted above, what Carpenter said about the third-party doctrine as to CSLI applies with full force to GPS data. It follows that for the Davis good-faith exception to apply to the GPS search here, the government needs more than general statements of the third-party doctrine in a binding appellate decision issued before the search; rather, the government must point to binding appellate precedent applying the doctrine to long-term historical GPS data or its equivalent.
The government loses the GPS data evidence. And it may lose even more than that if any of its other evidence was derived from this unlawful acquisition of data, which possibly includes DNA samples and social media records.
Not every court has read the Carpenter decision as retroactive, but this court's opinion makes really good points about why it should be read that way in all instances. The Third Party Doctrine was altered significantly by this decision, even if it only dealt with cell site location info. It has changed the contours of what can be considered a "reasonable" search of records held by third parties. Location info is only the beginning. The court's extension of this protection to third-party GPS records sends a message to law enforcement that the stuff they did for the last 40 years (thanks to Smith v. Maryland) may no longer survive a suppression challenge.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: 4th amendment, carpenter, gps, jones, supreme court, third party doctrine, warrants
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Only criminals need "privacy."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
And we have another volunteer for the Live in a Glass Cube in Times Square for a Year project!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
If I could setup a Patreon account and wear shirts adorned with the information, I would gladly volunteer for such a year.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Then I guess you are out of luck John.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Which is why you never provide any evidence to back up your hallucinations.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
You must be a criminal hiding as an AC.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
... says the Anonymous Coward.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
So the cops broke the law. Big deal.
There's still no punishment. The evidence will be suppressed, that's all.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: So the cops broke the law. Big deal.
In this case, I think that's a good thing. The police entered the dealership while investigating the case, as their lead was a vehicle belonging to the dealership (not the defendant).
They asked someone at the dealership about the location of their vehicle during a specific time period, and the person voluntarily handed over the login credentials to the tracking system so the police could look at the location information over that period.
While this was not the purpose of that database, it WAS designed to locate the vehicle if the driver failed their contractual obligations and the vehicle needed to be repossessed. If those contractual obligations included "must not be used in carrying out of a felony" then this was a bit of a grey area.
That area has since been much more defined, but it wasn't at the time. Retroactive punishment sounds like a bad idea. Punishing an officer who does this NOW makes a lot more sense.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The "Good Faith Exception" always kills me. Not knowing something is illegal is not a defense for anyone except the individuals tasked with enforcement of the law.
I don't really know when we went from holding law enforcement to a higher standard and having them lead by example to holding them to a lower standard.
Law enforcement agencies in the US keep complaining that they are not respected, but the reality is they aren't because they do not hold themselves to a higher standard.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
In this case though, it's more than just not knowing it's illegal -- it's that no court had yet determined that it was illegal.
I think this is the perfect situation to test (not roll over because of) the Good Faith exception.
After Carpenter though, my view is that Good Faith goes out the window, as the issue isn't legal questionability, but personal ignorance of the law (which, as you say, shouldn't be an excuse for ANYONE).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
it's that no court had yet determined that it was illegal.
It seems quite reasonable based on the 4th amendment to claim that the default is that warrant-less searches are illegal, and we have to wait on the courts or Congress to make it legal.
Why should we assume that a warrant-less search is legal until a court has declared it illegal?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
So..
Do they need it if they directly Hack you?
Its not to hard..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
and there will be a CFAA prosecution here for sharing login credentials in violation of the site's Terms of Service, right? :)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
For want of a nail...
And to think, this case and others like it could have been easily saved if the police involved hadn't been so damn lazy/incompetent.
If you have enough for a warrant get a warrant.
If you have enough for a warrant but you're just not sure you need one ask for one anyway.
If you don't have enough for a warrant then you don't have enough to track someone or rifle through their stuff, and if you have enough but can't be bothered then you're clearly too damn lazy and/or incompetent to have your current job.
This is not a difficult concept for anyone without a badge, and it should be even easier for those with badges.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: For want of a nail...
"so damn lazy/incompetent.
If you have enough for a warrant get a warrant."
Lazier than most would imagine.
Only in Hollywood movies to judges sit their examining and struggling over whether a warrant is valid or not. In real life judges pretty much contracted out to the police and prosecutors to rubber stamp anything they want a warrant for. No matter how far fetched or ludicrous the grounds for the search, 99 out of 100 judges would have singed without even bothering to read what the warrant was for. The only reason this officer could not get a warrant is because he didn't take the 20 minutes to type it up and have a judge blindly sign off on it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Multiple search warrants
A detective in Marin county got a search warrant for a tracker to put on my vehicle because he thought I was stealing olive trees in Marin county. Well he quickly figured out that I am never in Marin county , I’m always In Sonoma county. 2 weeks later I got pulled over by the Sonoma sheriffs detectives with an olive tree In My trailer. The cop said I got you I have been following you in real time. I got you and he pulled the tracker out from under the car and showed it to me. So basically the Marin sheriff who got the search warrant which clearly says any peace officer in the county of Marin can track me, he handed the search warrant over to Sonoma county. Does that mean that every tiimevi drive to a different county , that country has the ability to track me in real time. Are t these cops just handing the search warrant from one county to the next, that doesn’t seem right. It’s one thing for counties to share info but it’s a whole another level of intrusion when they are able to track me In Real time. In essence this search warrant is cartevblanc for any county I drive in to track me I. Real time. Should t these different counties have to get their own search warrant or shouldn’t there be something in the comments section of the warrant explicitly stating they can share real time info. I am u see the impression that the judge gave Marin county the right to follow and track me wherever I drive in California, not for tbe Marin sheriff to hand off the tracker to other counties so they can track me in real time. No way man. Please help because Sonoma county wants to take me down
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
You just need to google a free gps tracker to get this data. Here is https://cellspyapps.org/free-gps-phone-tracker/ hte first link that I got. Explains everything.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]