Just over a year ago, the US Supreme Court declined to clear up the nationwide legal confusion regarding whether the Constitution requires authorities to get a probable-cause court warrant to obtain cell-site location data records of suspects under investigation.
The federal circuit courts of appeal and the lower courts have been all over the map when it comes to this bread-and-butter privacy issue. Even AT&T has said it was confused about the law, and it has demanded clarity on the issue. To that end, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers proposed legislation Wednesday that seeks to answer the question once and for all: the government would need probable-cause warrants to obtain geolocation data on suspects.
