US Court rules warrants are needed for cops to access smart electrical meter data

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

A US federal judge has ruled that people with smart meters have a reasonable expectation of privacy and as such law enforcement will require a warrant to acquire that data.
Traditional spinning meters are read perhaps once a month by your local utility, and at that level of granularity there’s not much you can tell about a house or apartment other than whether perhaps someone has been living there and whether they have abnormally high electricity use — useful information if you were, say, looking for illicit pot growers with a farm in the basement.

Smart meters, on the other hand, send exact meter readings at short intervals, perhaps every 15 minutes, and these readings may be kept for years. With that much detail you could not only tell whether someone lives in a house, but whether they’re home, whether the fridge has been opened recently, what room they’re in, how often they do laundry, and so on. The fingerprints of individual devices on the house’s electrical network aren’t that difficult to figure out.

To be sure this can help the utility with load balancing, predicting demand and so on. But what if the government wants to do more with it, for example to establish whether someone was home at a certain time in a criminal investigation?
But as the 7th Circuit pointed out in its ruling on appeal (hosted at the EFF), there isn’t really a third party: the city collects the data, and city authorities want to use the data. And even if there were, “a home occupant does not assume the risk of near constant monitoring by choosing to have electricity in her home.” So it is a search.

Collecting the data is not an unreasonable search, however, when it is done with no “prosecutorial intent,” the court ruled. That means that when the city is acting in its own interest as far as administrating and improving the electrical grid, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to collect this information without a warrant.

But should it be required for more than that, for instance in a criminal investigation, a warrant would certainly be required

Read More..