The effort to stop law enforcement agencies in the United States tracking people’s cellphones without a warrant has reached a major new milestone.
On Tuesday, Maine became the second state in recent weeks to enact a law that will force authorities to get a judge to authorize a warrant before obtaining either historic or real-time location data about a person’s movements. Maine’s legislature voted to pass the tracking law after it sailed through both houses in the state in May. According to the ACLU of Maine, the legislature took the decisive step of overriding veto by Gov. Paul LePage, who had declined to sign off on the bill.*
Notably, LD 415 doesn’t just include provisions that will require authorities in the state to obtain a search warrant before tracking cellphones or other GPS-enabled devices. The law also includes a requirement that law enforcement agencies notify a person that she was tracked within three days, unless they can prove that secrecy is necessary in order to delay the notification for an unspecified period. An earlier draft of LD 415 would have boosted surveillance transparency, too, mandating the annual publication of a report online detailing the number of times location data were sought by law enforcement agencies. However, the transparency clause was removed from the final version of the law after a series of amendments were added.*
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