Thurs. Oct. 20, 2021 | By Jacob Ryan – wfpl |
State attorneys arguing that police don’t need a search warrant to track a person’s location in real-time through their cell phone were met with skepticism from the Kentucky Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The state’s highest court heard arguments in a case that stems from a Woodford County robbery, in which police tracked a suspect’s location by “pinging” his cell phone without a search warrant.
The Kentucky Attorney General’s office argued that police don’t need a search warrant to track someone driving on a public road, even if that tracking is conducted through technology.
“This is not a case about police accessing data stored on cell phones. It is not about whether the police can use dragnet surveillance techniques to monitor an individual’s movement,” said Brett Nolan, a deputy solicitor general for the Office of the Kentucky Attorney General. “This is about using technology to do something that police have always been able to do, which they’ve always done: public surveillance on a public road.”
Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. pushed back, questioning why real-time cell phone tracking wouldn’t require a search warrant, pointing to the detailed data collected by cell companies.
“Don’t I have an expectation of some sort of privacy in that information?” Minton said. “Do we give it up by owning a cell phone?”
This case decision is of national interest as tech-based police investigations become more commonplace, said Nathan Freed Wessler, the deputy projects director for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Since the founding of this country we have set limits on what police can do without judicial oversight,” he said. “Without protections from the courts, people are really vulnerable to having their entire lives become an open book for the government.”
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled police must obtain a warrant to access historical cell location data. High courts in several other states have ruled that police do need search warrants for real-time cell data, Wessler said. In many states, however, the question is not yet settled.
“The court has an opportunity to make Kentucky a leader in securing people’s privacy rights,” Wessler said.
Cell phones collect the most intimate details about a person’s life, said Brad Clark, president of the Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. To access that data, he believes police need a warrant, and he said the state Attorney General’s position on the matter is worrisome.
I think everyone should be concerned about this approach the government wants to adopt that they can search anyone without any judicial oversight,” he said. “We need a bright line rule that requires a warrant.”…
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