Texas (TEXAS!) Federal judge rules in favor of cell phone privacy [telecom]

(hat tip to Lauren Weinstein of Privacy Digest)

A federal judge has ruled that subscriber data captured from cellphone towers is protected by the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment guarantee against illegal searches and seizures.

The decision is part of a sea change from half a decade worth of previous rulings, in which police weren't required to obtain search warrants based on probable cause before accessing the subscriber information. US Magistrate Judge Stephen Wm Smith of the Southern District of Texas said recent changes in case law and rapidly evolving mobile technology required a departure from the outcomes in that long line of cases. ... "In 1789 it was inconceivable that every peripatetic step of a citizen's life could be monitored, recorded, and revealed to the government," he wrote in a decision that was released late last month but only noticed in the last few days. "For a cell phone user born in 1984, however, it is conceivable that every movement of his adult life can be imperceptibly captured, compiled, and retrieved from a digital dossier somewhere in a computer cloud. Now as then, the Fourth Amendment remains our polestar." ------ rest:

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may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

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danny burstein
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