A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that police must obtain a search warrant from a judge if they want tracking data of a suspect from cellphone towers, the Associated Press reported. Obtaining the records without a search warrant is as violation of the Fourth Amendment, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, because people have an expectation of privacy in their movements. "While committing a crime is certainly not within a legitimate expectation of privacy, if the cell site location data could place him near those scenes, it could place him near any other scene," the judges wrote. The issue will likely make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2012 that secretly attaching GPS devices to suspects' vehicles constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment.
