Late month, Mexico’s lower congressional house passed a bill that would give authorities free reign to track the location of any cell phone in the country.
According to the new Federal Penal Procedure Code, Article 133, the attorney general’s office will be allowed to geographically locate telephones in real time, without even bothering with a warrant. The article mentions tracking in investigations into organized crime, drug-related crime, kidnapping, extortion or threats.
Cell phones — even the plain old mono-color, 16-button variety — continually broadcast their location to the telephone provider’s cell phone towers so that they know where to send incoming calls. This new law will allow government authorities to go directly to the telecom companies to retrieve this information.
As an unparalleled and still relatively new technology, cell phones are thus able to provide precise, personal location data like never before.
The law, known popularly as the Ley de Geolocalización, has a wide base of support in the government. Luis Wertman Zaslav, president of the Citizen’s Council for Public Security and Justice in the Federal District (CCSPy PJDF), believes the law will dramatically cut into cell phone theft when thieves can’t turn the phones on for fear of being tracked.
Others, like Alejandro Joaquin Marti Garcia, president of Citizen’s Security Observation System (SOS), point out that the law will make kidnapping and extortion much more difficult for criminals using cell phones to communicate with the families of victims.
These groups are happy to see a law that cuts through a plodding bureaucracy to fight criminals more efficiently.
However, a number of websites and watch groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the blog, humanrightsgeek, have questioned the constitutionality and possible human rights violations surrounding the law.Dr. Dante Haro Reyes of the department of public rights at the University of Guadalajara outlined three academic points on which the new Mexican law lacks credibility.
First, the law is not specific. It is not clear where, in what cases or under what circumstances exactly geolocation can be used. Furthermore, none of the measures and requirements for requests of location data or the management of data, once obtained, are defined.
Second, it includes no provisions for judicial authorization and supervision, nor for permanent or periodical judicial review, which Dr. Haro called “Indispensable.” In other words, authorities do not even need to get a warrant.
Third, there is no legal recourse in place if authorities do abuse geolocation collection.
Rights experts like Dr. Haro are not arguing against the potential good of tracking criminals, they are worried that the law seems to have passed right through congress with no safeguards in place and little debate as to potential abuses.
With such a young technology, untested in Mexican law, experts are looking around the world for precedent.
In 2009, Malte Spitz, a German Green Party politician and privacy advocate, asked his cell phone provider, Deutsche Telekom, to disclose the records they had on him. After a legal scuffle, they were forced to comply, to the tune of 35,831 records on his cell phone use stretching back six months. Spitz has made all of the data available publicly in an astounding map format at http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention to demonstrate that location data, collected often enough, can reveal a lot of information about a person’s habits and private life.
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in The United States v. Antoine Jones that police tracking Jones’ vehicle by GPS without a proper warrant constituted a search, and a violation of his reasonable expectation of privacy.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her concurring opinion on the case, “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations … the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse … because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices.”
Mexican cell phone firms may already be holding reams of data on each customer. The Mexican government may soon be able to crack those binders with impunity.
A Mexican personal data protection law similar to the one that helped Spitz in Germany is already in place, and it should let citizens request information that companies retain on them, but it does not necessarily mean companies have to expunge that data, and it certainly does not bar the government from accessing it according to the bill passed last week. To find out more, contact the Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos (IFAI).