Court: Texas cops can access cell-phone location data without a warrant
/Texas' Fourth Court of Appeals in San San Antonio recently ruled that police are not required to obtain a warrant to acquire cell-site location data from a service provider because of the Third Party doctrine.
As the prosecutors' association's weekly case summary put it, the question in Ford v. State was "Did the State violate the Fourth Amendment by acquiring from the phone company, without a warrant, the defendant’s cell phone records that revealed information (tower-pings, outgoing and incoming communication, etc.) connecting him to a murder?"
The court's holding, again from TDCAA: "No. Fourth Amendment protections are surrendered when a person exposes activities to a third party. That exposure makes the records merely business records of the phone company and not protected communications." See pp. 16-28 of the opinion for the court's reading of current Texas law on cell-phone location data.
This is important because law enforcement interests have been telling legislative staff at the state capitol that last year's changes in Texas law to Art. 18.21 of the Code of Criminal Procedure regarding cloud-based email and other content already require Texas cops to get warrants for location data. My response has been 1) it's not true, for reasons evident in the Ford opinion, and 2) if it is true, there's no harm in updating CCP 18.21 to get rid of the outdated language and make the warrant requirement explicit.
