Stripped of their ability to track crime suspects using GPS devices without a warrant, federal agents may instead rely more heavily on mobile phones as keys to tracking suspects. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police must obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a suspect’s vehicle or other personal property. But this ruling did not address the issue of smartphones, which of course store details about the locations and activities of their owners.
This week a federal judge in California agreed to issue a warrant ordering Google (GOOG) to unlock a suspected pimp’s Android phone so that federal agents could build their case against him. The agents asked for the warrant because they could not unlock the phone on their own, but federal law is not completely clearly on whether police need a warrant to seize a smartphone in the first place. Laws differ from state to state, and once a person is arrested, the police can take their phone without a warrant.
Currently federal agents do not need a warrant to access information from a smartphone that is stored on a remote server, although Vermont’s Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced a bill that would change that. Leahy says the nation’s laws governing electronic information are out of date, but some law enforcement officials see new technologies as a way to work more effectively, if they can do legally. Speaking to Congress about the Supreme Court decision to require warrants for GPS devices, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that tracking suspected terrorists will now require much more manpower. “We have a number of people in the United States who we could not indict, there’s not probable cause to indict them or to arrest them who present a threat of terrorism, articulated maybe up on the Internet, may have purchased a gun, but taken no particular steps to take a terrorist act,” Mueller said. “And we are stuck in the position of surveilling that person for a substantial period of time.”
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