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The Eastern District of New York ruled that probable cause and a warrant are necessary to access and obtain long-term cell phone records to track the owner’s location.

In Matter of an Application of the United States of America for an Order Authorizing the Release of Historical Cell-Site Information, 10-MC-897, Eastern District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis held that the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the governent are applicable to cell-site-location records.

Garaufis wrote:

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. It is time that the courts begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require change to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.

Citing, United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d at 555-68, the court noted that people have an “objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements over an extended period that courts have found they do not have for one trip in public or a few trips over a short period.”

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