‘Pinging" has been used to assist in solving crimes, identifying targets, recovering property and rescuing victims. Earlier this year, when police in Chickasha, Okla., were seeking the killers of an elderly couple, they were able to identify the suspect’s cell phone and pinged it to locate the suspects. Similarly, pinging a stolen cell phone led to the identification of a suspect and his subsequent admissions in upstate New York.1 Simply stated, pinging is the tracking of a cell phone through the electronic signature it emits. Like technology itself, the law concerning pinging and the Fourth Amendment has been rapidly evolving in both the federal and state courts. This article will discuss the present status of that evolution.
Pinging and the Service Provider
Pinging discloses the cell tower range in which a person’s cell phone is situated. It allows for a real time determination of the approximate location of the telephone user.2 This is contrasted with cell site location information (CSLI), which is utilized to identify locations that the telephone user traversed in the past.3 Pinging utilizes the E911 global positioning system (GPS) mandated to be part of every cell phone manufactured after 2005.4
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