Without a warrant, a U.S. law enforcement agency can obtain the following pieces of information about your cell phone use:
- text messages
- voicemails
- geolocation data
- phone numbers you called
- when you called
In fact, everything but a phone conversation, because that’s all that is protected by antiquated laws. Consequently government officials are taking advantage of this, with 1.3 million requests for cell phone data last year. And each request could involve hundreds of subscribers, via “cell tower dumps”.
“We’re talking about everything you can get from a cellphone carrier, except the content of the conversation,” says ACLU legislative counsel Chris Calabrese. Much of this information can be obtained without direct or substantive evidence of criminal behavior. When a law enforcement agency requests a cell tower “dump,” that is, information on who was near a specific cell tower at a given time, “it may get back hundreds or even thousands of names.”
New legislation, if passed, will partially fix the problem. The Geolocation Privacy and Security Act bill would allow only the following without a warrant:
- “emergency situation” involving “immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person”
- “conspiratorial activities threatening the national security interest”
- “conspiratorial activities characteristic of organized crime.”
Another bill on the horizon would not allow any exceptions, with warrants required for all cell phone data. Until then, disposable phones are your only option if you have something to hide.
