Go to Original
By LEVI PULKKINEN
Wireless carriers give location to police without a warrant
The call came in to police just after midnight April 16.
Hours before, a distraught young man had phoned his mother, hinting he wanted to kill himself. When he didn't meet her as planned, she telephoned Seattle police and reported her son missing.
Because of increasing advances in technology, officers were able to find the missing man's cellular phone using his wireless network. Two hours after he was reported missing, the man was found alive but unwell lying on his desk and taken to University Hospital for a psychological evaluation.
The night's incident was one of tens of thousands in which a life may have been saved because of the ability to find someone through a cell phone. But life-or-death missing persons cases remain rare, and locater technologies raise questions about warrantless searches.
Missing persons cases present an unusual problem for police -- it's not a crime to disappear. Without a crime, police can't get a search warrant. In a criminal case, no warrant would mean no phone records for authorities.
Instead, King County Sheriff Sue Rahr said, missing persons investigators rely on phone companies to release customers' location information voluntarily. The companies require a statement from police that the phone owner may be in danger.
"The government does not have the right to look at your cellular telephone records," Rahr said. "When we do these ... cases, it's a stretch, to speak candidly."
Each year, law enforcement agencies around the country receive an overwhelming number of missing persons reports. Seattle police alone receive 2,100 to 2,300 missing persons reports a year, or about six a day, said Officer Mark Jamieson, a department spokesman.
Adults account for only 300 to 400 of the missing, Jamieson said. The rest are primarily runaway children, but, in either case, most are found within days of disappearing.
Exceptions stand out. Take the case of Seattle radio host Mike Webb.
Webb's decomposed corpse was found in his Queen Anne home in June, two months after he'd been reported missing. Prosecutors have since charged Webb's houseguest, 29-year-old Scott Brian White, in the killing, claiming that White told police he hacked Webb to death with an ax.
High-profile missing persons cases distort the public's perception of the reasons people disappear, Rahr said.
"It's a very, very small percentage of missing persons cases where it turns out that a crime has been committed," Rahr said. "That doesn't mean we're not investigating them vigorously, but it has to happen in context."
Rahr said investigators should move to acquire a missing person's cell records only if they think something has gone wrong. Before they move forward, they also need to look for other leads -- often bank transactions in missing persons cases -- and make sure that they're not unwittingly reconnecting an abuser with a spouse who has fled.
When nothing else worked, phone records proved invaluable last September in the search for Maple Valley resident Tanya Rider.
Rider had been missing for six days when King County sheriff's deputies obtained her rough location from Verizon Wireless. Searchers using that information found her alive hours later, trapped in her wrecked SUV off of state Route 169.
Since Tanya Rider's rescue, Rahr said she's met with representatives from each major cell phone provider. She's now making plans for a series of training seminars to educate detectives about the uses of the technology in missing persons cases.
In March, sheriff's deputies used the same technology to look for Nicholas Francisco, a SeaTac father of three who went missing in February. Phone records didn't turn up any new leads, Deputy Rodney Chinnick said, but the case remains active.
"It's still a work in progress, and it will continue to be until he's located," Chinnick said.
If they had been looking for Rider or Francisco as part of a criminal investigation, investigators likely would have needed a search warrant to get their cell phone records.
In missing persons cases, though, cell phone providers require that officers assert a customer may be in immediate danger -- "exigent circumstances" in the industry's parlance -- before releasing the information, said Joyce Masamitsu, associate director for state public policy for Verizon Wireless. Verizon alone handled about 26,000 such requests last year.
Masamitsu said Verizon, like other cellular providers, requires detailed follow-up reports from investigators. But she said the company doesn't conduct any independent review of the requests before releasing location information.
"All the officer needs to do is confirm to us that an exigent circumstance exists," she said.
No legal challenges have been filed related to cell locater technology in missing persons cases. But privacy rights advocates say unambiguous guidelines are needed to ensure that the technology isn't misused.
"What you'd want is those rules to be in place, and, as far as we know, they are not," said Rebecca Jechke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
No comments:
Post a Comment