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A law requiring police to obtain a search warrant before tracking Americans' cell phones may imperil criminal investigations and endanger children's lives, a law enforcement representative told Congress this week.

Obtaining a search warrant when monitoring the whereabouts of someone "who may be attempting to victimize a child over the Internet will have a significant slowing effect on the processing of child exploitation leads," said Richard Littlehale of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. "If that is acceptable, so be it, but it is a downstream effect that must be considered."

Littlehale's remarks to a … Read more

To nab a pair of men accused of robbing banks in Connecticut, court documents show the FBI turned to a novel investigative technique last year: warrantless monitoring of the locations of about 180 different cell phones, court documents show.

The FBI obtained a secret order--it has not been made public--commanding nine different telephone companies to provide federal police "with all cell site tracking data and cell site locator information for all incoming and outgoing calls to and from the target numbers."

But because the U.S. Justice Department did not obtain a warrant by proving to a judge … Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday said a police department could legally review text messages on a department-issued pager that a SWAT team member used for personal conversations while on duty.

Jeff Quon, who worked as a sergeant in Ontario, Calif., did not have his privacy rights violated when a supervisor discovered that 90 percent of messages sent while on duty were personal, the justices unanimously ruled.

What makes this case unique is that the Supreme Court went out of its way to avoid setting a precedent for what kind of searches of government employees' electronic devices are reasonable … Read more

The U.S. Justice Department has abruptly abandoned what had become a high-profile court fight to read Yahoo users' e-mail messages without obtaining a search warrant first.

In a two-page brief filed Friday, the Obama administration withdrew its request for warrantless access to the complete contents of the Yahoo Mail accounts under investigation. CNET was the first to report on the Denver case in an article on Tuesday.

Yahoo's efforts to fend off federal prosecutors' broad request attracted allies--in the form of Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation--who … Read more

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company's social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so.

"I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google's cafes," engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. "He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated."

You might call Brin's enthusiasm premature, especially since privacy criticisms prompted Google to make a series of quick changes a … Read more

When Christian Taylor stopped by the Sprint store in Daly City, Calif., last November, he was planning to buy around 30 BlackBerry handhelds.

But a Sprint employee on the lookout for fraud grew suspicious about the address and other details relating to Taylor's company, "Hype Univercity," and called the police. Taylor was arrested on charges of felony identity fraud, his car was impounded, and his iPhone was confiscated and searched by police without a warrant.

A San Mateo County judge is scheduled to hear testimony on Thursday morning in this case, which could set new ground rules … Read more

The FBI and other police agencies don't need to obtain a search warrant to learn the locations of Americans' cell phones, the U.S. Department of Justice told a federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Friday.

A Justice Department attorney told the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that there is no constitutional problem with obtaining records from cellular providers that can reveal the approximate locations of handheld and mobile devices. (See CNET's previous article.)

There "is no constitutional bar" to acquiring "routine business records held by a communications service provider," said Mark Eckenwiler, a … Read more

Earlier this week, iPhone repair site iResQ posted photos of what the blog claims are fourth-generation iPhone parts, received "as a sample from a reputable source." The most obvious change in features of the alleged new iPhone is that the front panel--and therefore, the phone--measures nearly a quarter-inch taller than the iPhone 3GS.

iResQ claims the new iPhone parts contain an LCD that's glued at the factory to the digitizer, which would suggest higher repair costs as both parts will have to be replaced at once (versus the separate LCD and digitizer on the iPhone 3G and … Read more

Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.

FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A … Read more