These days, anyone with an Android or iPhone can find a neighborhood pizza joint by tapping on a handheld touch screen. But what if police could find someone just as easily, simply by tapping into a person's phone records?
Law enforcement's use of phone records has come under greater scrutiny recently, thanks in part to one of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, Britain-based The News of the World. The now shuttered paper generated its own headlines with a phone-hacking scandal in which British police were allegedly involved.
Across the pond, such possibilities concern the American Civil Liberties Union. On Aug. 3, the organization sent public records requests to 379 law enforcement agencies nationwide to determine how those agencies track people using cell-phone location data.
In Washington, those requests, initiated by ACLU-WA, landed in four police department offices: Bellevue, Tacoma, Yakima and Spokane.
The ACLU seeks a vast amount of information from the nation's law enforcement agencies, including:
- practices, procedures and policies enforcement agencies employ to obtain phone-location data
- legal standards (such as "probable cause") agencies use to obtain records
- ways location records are used to identify "communities of interest"
- format (whether hard copy or online) in which such information is kept
- statistics on how the agencies use location records, including the number of requests for which no court order was obtained
The same technology that allows cell phones to locate a coffee shop -- whether through GPS positioning or the phone's ability to determine its proximity to nearby cell towers -- can be used to locate that phone and, hence, its user. Location data obtained from a phone, the ACLU warns, make it easy for law enforcement to know a person's whereabouts and what a person is doing at any given location.