By Tim Cushing – Tech Dirt | Fri. Dec. 18, 2020 |

The Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement agencies needed a warrant to obtain cell site location info. The ability to turn third parties (like telcos) into proxy long-term tracking devices concerned the court, which decided this wasn’t permissible under the Fourth Amendment. Every American carries a cellphone. But just because they do doesn’t mean they agree the government should be able to track their movements with them.

No problem, said federal law enforcement agencies. We’ll just get the same data from new sources — ones not specifically mentioned in the Carpenter decision. Data brokers harvesting location data from phone apps sell access to government agencies, allowing them to bypass the warrant requirement.

This new source of data location has become a concern for some legislators, which have demanded answers from agencies like the IRS and CBP about their acquisition and use of this data. One company — Venntel — is currently facing a Congressional investigation of its data selling practices. This hasn’t stopped CBP from buying data to track immigrants. But it has perhaps led to one agency — one with a long history of bulk collection violations — to ditch its contract with Venntell. Joseph Cox fills in the details at Motherboard.

The Drug Enforcement Administration abruptly cancelled its contract with Venntel, a U.S. contractor that sells location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on people’s phones around the world.

The news signals that although Venntel’s smartphone location data may be popular with some federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) which Motherboard found spent nearly half a million dollars to access the data, other law enforcement bodies may have less use for such technology.

As Cox’s report suggests, this may not be an indicator of reluctance to engage with a vendor currently under investigation. Instead, it may indicate some agencies find the harvested data less useful than others. The data CBP accesses allows it to track people’s movements on both sides of the border, which is far more useful than scattershot data that may not deliver anything of value to DEA agents seeking to make a drug bust.

The DEA’s cancellation was rather abrupt, suggesting it didn’t feel like paying for something it didn’t see itself using.

Keith Chu, communications director for the office of Senator Ron Wyden, described to Motherboard a conversation that his office had with the DEA.

“On DEA, they told our office: ‘[The Venntel contract was] terminated on our end before the first 30 days of the one year period of performance after determining it would not fit our needs,'” Chu said.

Then again, the DEA may have just cancelled this contract temporarily. The company is being investigated by Wyden and the senator has asked a lot of questions agencies may not feel like answering. Perhaps the DEA may re-engage when the heat dies down. Or it may seek to obtain this data from a different broker — one not currently targeted by a Congressional investigation. Given the restraints on collecting location data from service providers, any parallel source of data is still preferable to seeking a warrant.

If it’s not useful now, there’s a chance it will be in the future. That’s why Congress needs to act. And if it doesn’t, the courts need to examine this data collection under the constraints of the Carpenter decision and decide whether it’s ok for law enforcement to dodge warrant requirements that would seem to apply to ANY tracking of individuals, even if the data is sourced from third party data brokers.

Read the original article HERE.

By Ethan Genter – Cape Cod Times | Mon. Nov. 30, 2020 |

On Monday, Nov. 30, 2020, the Supreme Judicial Court (MA) declined to grant Wilson a new trial or reduce the jury’s guilty verdict on the charge of first-degree murder. The court found that trial judge Gary Nickerson did not err in his decision to allow cellphone location data into evidence and didn’t abuse his discretion in denying Wilson a new trial.

In 2015, Wilson, of Centerville, was convicted of murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and improper disposal of a body in the 2010 death of Hall, 23, of Nantucket.

The prosecution presented evidence that Wilson shot Hall, who was pregnant with his child, several times and then dumped her body in Falmouth.

In July 2010, Hall and her husband, Ram Rimal, came to the Cape from Nantucket and planned to stay the night at a West Yarmouth hotel. Hall went missing the day before the pair, who were in an arranged marriage, planned to meet with immigration officials in Boston about Rimal’s status.

Wilson told police that he had gone to Hall’s hotel room that night, but denied meeting with her later in the evening. Hall was having an affair with Wilson, who was also married, and was four months pregnant at the time.

Police found Hall’s bloodstained rental car a couple days after her disappearance at the Route 6 Exit 6 commuter lot, but her body was not recovered until almost two years later by a man walking his dog in East Falmouth. Police also found seven bullets from a .38 caliber gun and the skeleton of her fetus at the site.

Cell site location information, commonly referred to as CSLI, was used extensively in the trial and helped pinpoint where Wilson was the night of the murder. Cell information is collected by cellphone companies and shows the approximate location of a phone in relation to nearby cell towers.

The location information placed Wilson at the hotel, the commuter lot and where Hall’s body was found on the night of her murder. Data also showed that Hall and Wilson’s phones traveled together throughout the evening.

At the time, a warrant was not needed to get the cellphone data, but a U.S. Supreme Court ruling after the trial found that police need search warrants to obtain more than two weeks worth of cell site location information — a decision that does apply retroactively.

Wilson’s attorney, Janet Pumphrey, argued that without the CSLI, which police did not originally get or need a warrant for, Wilson wouldn’t have been found guilty. She also contended that the information should have been suppressed and when police did get a search warrant for it in 2014, it was tainted by the initial warrantless search.

The Supreme Judicial Court found that the cellphone data did not need to be suppressed if the prosecution could show that it could lawfully obtain the evidence independently without the initial tainted evidence.

“The defendant’s sole argument in this regard is that, when stripped of information gleaned from the prior illegal search, the 2014 warrant affidavit lacked probable cause,” the court wrote.

The Supreme Judicial Court disagreed, concluding that ample probable cause was gained by untainted facts known to police prior to the acquisition of Wilson’s cellphone information in 2010.

Police had information that Wilson had a registered pistol, that he was the likely father of Hall’s unborn child, that Hall had told a friend that Wilson had asked her to get an abortion and that Wilson and Hall communicated by cellphone extensively the day she had gone missing. Police also knew that Hall was killed by a gun that Wilson had publicly implied he carried.

“For all of these reasons, the trial judge did not err in denying the defendant’s motion to suppress the defendant’s CSLI, and the motion judge did not abuse his discretion in denying the defendant’s motion for a new trial and for an evidentiary hearing on this issue,” the court wrote.

The high court also rejected Wilson’s argument that his attorney during the trial provided ineffective counsel by failing to make a motion to suppress evidence of the initial warrantless search of his data, saying that the other evidence against Wilson meant that there wasn’t a substantial miscarriage of justice.

The cellphone data played a crucial role in the case and the court’s decision “has important precedential value in the ever-developing area of cellphone case law,” the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s office wrote in a statement.

District Attorney Michael O’Keefe hoped that the ruling would bring some peace of mind to Hall’s mother.

“She has been a courageous woman throughout this terrible ordeal,” he said. “I also want to commend the prosecution team for their hard work on a difficult case.”

Read the original article HERE.