Comment by kevin_thibedeau
5 years ago
You don't need a warrant to get personal information held by third parties who willingly hand it over. The IRS isn't in the wrong here legally. If Congress actually cared they'd enact real data privacy laws with teeth.
Maybe if this was 2017, but as of Carpenter v. United States the third party doctrine no longer extends to historical cellphone location records.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
This applies to CSLI data only - if it's coming from another source (e.g. 3rd party tracking), not in violation.
Supreme Court (Carpenter v. United States) says otherwise.
Wasn’t the point of their comment “that give that data willingly”? If a company is constantly giving tips by choice, why wouldn’t the government be allowed to use it? Is the law written in such a way that the government can’t politely ask / be snitched to? I thought everything was fair game if a polite request was made and accepted.
I completely disagree with what they should be allowed to ask politely for; but, isn’t that the state of the world?
As another comment stated, this is only for CSLI data. Tracking data from a different third party is still fair game, and that's what the IRS was/is using.
It's ridiculous that our best reference for what is legal or not is a supreme court ruling these days.
That's kind of the point of a supreme court; the realization that it's impossible to get all of this stuff right in a legislative body and someone has to resolve the conflicts.
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That's... Always been the case?
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The United States has a common law system, which relies heavily l heavily on court precedent.
https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/lawschool/pre-law/intro-to-....