Appeals court okays warrantless tracking

A federal appeals court ruled that police do not need a warrant to track the location of a suspect's phone.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the Drug Enforcement Administration did not violate the constitutional rights of Melvin Skinner when they collected his phone's GPS data. Skinner's lawyers argued that the police violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches by collecting his phone's GPS data without first obtaining a warrant. But the appeals court ruled that Skinner has no reasonable expectation of privacy for his cellphone's location data. "When criminals use modern technological devices to carry out criminal acts and to reduce the possibility of detection, they can hardly complain when the police take advantage of the inherent characteristics of those very devices to catch them," Judge John Rogers wrote in his opinion for the panel.