A federal appeals court has ruled that a search warrant is not required for law enforcement in order to obtain cell tower location data.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit -- which includes Virginia and Maryland -- ruled 12 to 3 that police can obtain "cell site" location information, or CSLI, under decades-old rules that allow authorities to collect business or "third party" records with a court order, according to The Washington Post.
Though the use of the data, police can track the long-term movements of a suspect's mobile phone.
"The Supreme Court may in the future limit, or even eliminate, the third-party doctrine. Congress may act to require a warrant for CSLI," Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the majority. "But without a change in controlling law, we cannot conclude that the Government violated the Fourth Amendment in this case."
Defendants Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan, who were both convicted in armed robberies around Baltimore, believed search warrants should have been required to access their cell tower location data.
Investigators gathered seven months of phone records; including an average of 130 neighborhood location data points per day over 221 days.
Police seeking the phone records were not required to show a judge probable cause that a crime had been committed, as required in obtaining a search warrant.
U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein of Maryland said the court's decision is "in accord with all other federal circuits that have examined this issue."
