We work with cybersecurity leaders across the United States at our Information Security conferences.
Most of these leaders have indicated that they highly value privacy.
And they often spend considerable time protecting their own private information and certainly the private information their companies hold.
But what if ensuring privacy allowed a convicted armed robber to go free instead of serving his 116 year sentence. How would you feel about privacy then?
That is not just a hypothetical question.
Police used cell phone location records to show Timothy Carpenter was "in the area" each time a series of armed robberies took place.
And they used records spanning not just a few days but 127 days, the stretch of time where these robberies occurred.
Now Timothy Carpenter and his legal team have argued in front of the United States Supreme Court that the cell phone records that showed his whereabouts were obtained without a warrant and therefore should not have been allowed in his trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to 116 years.
In other words, his team argues, the convicted armed robber had an expectation his cell phone records were private.
The Supreme Court Blog has a great write-up on the hearing, and you quickly see that the "concept" of privacy is quite complicated in practice.
The SCOTUS blog captured the government's argument quite nicely, made by Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben:
"The Fourth Amendment does not protect records or information that you share with someone else. So Carpenter’s case (and others like it) hinges, Dreeben contended, on how the government got the information. And here, he emphasized, the cellphone providers created the records for their own purposes and gave them to the government; the government did not collect the data itself.
Several justices were skeptical that the case was as simple as Dreeben depicted it. Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out that, in Carpenter’s case, the cell phone provider had not actually generated the records entirely on its own. Instead, Roberts observed, the cell phone records are more like a “joint venture” with the phone’s owner."
If the issue of Privacy is one of your hot button issues, you'll want to read the entire SCOTUS blog report on the privacy rights case.
Justice Stephen Breyer noted what a complicated question this is: “This is an open box. We know not where we go...how do we draw the line?”
How. And where?