NEW YORK - August 23, 2011 - A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Monday that the government must establish probable cause and secure a warrant before obtaining records about a cell phone user's location, saying it violated the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches, according to the New York Law Journal.
"While the government's monitoring of our thoughts may be the archetypical Orwellian intrusion, the government's surveillance of our movements of a considerable time period through new technologies, such as the collection of cell-site-location records, without the protections of the Fourth Amendment, puts our country far closer to Oceania than our Constitution permits," wrote Eastern District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis.
The decision came after the U.S. Attorney's office sought to obtain 113 days of cell phone location data from Verizon Wireless under the Stored Communications Act. The measure allows law enforcement to obtain records from electronic communication services without a warrant if the records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."