Defendant did not have standing in the place he was found, but he had standing to challenge the search of his backpack that was with him, right up to the time he abandoned it. Defendant was found by pinging his cell phone, and he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the signal emitted by the phone to the provider, analyzing Jones and Smith and coming down with Smith. People v Moorer, 2013 NY Slip Op 23048, 2013 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 632 (Monroe Co. February 8, 2013):
In Smith v Maryland (442 U.S. at 742-743), decided in 1979, the Supreme Court held that the installation of a pen register was not a search within the Fourth Amendment. It noted that while most people may be oblivious to a pen register's esoteric functions, they presumably understand that one common use is to aid in the identification of individuals making annoying or obscene phone calls; to that end, the Court stated that while subjective expectations of privacy cannot be scientifically gauged, it is too much to believe that telephone subscribers harbor any general expectation of privacy that the numbers they dial will remain secret. The Court observed that all telephone users realize that they must "convey" phone numbers to their telephone company, since it is through the company switching equipment that telephone calls are completed. The Court further observed that all subscribers also realize that the telephone carrier has facilities for making permanent records of all numbers dialed, because their monthly bills contain a list of their long-distance toll calls. Thus, the Court concluded that, even if a defendant harbored some subjective expectation that the phone numbers he dialed would remain private, his expectation was not one, under the Katz analysis, that society was prepared to recognize as reasonable. The Court also noted that it is well settled that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties and that by making a phone call, he had to convey the number to the phone company if he wished to complete his call (id.). Thus, while a person may have calculated that the contents of his conversation would remain private, no one could rationally think that the number dialed would remain private (id).
Analogous here, more than thirty years later, this Court concludes, similarly, that a subscriber's signal (the transmission of it), necessary to make a call from his cell phone, does not entitle the subscriber to a reasonable expectation of privacy.
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