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The nation's largest wireless providers oppose a proposedCalifornia location privacy law that would require police to obtainsearch warrants to track a wireless customer's whereabouts, CNEThas learned. They're criticizing a new state bill, S.B. 1434 , that would require a judge to approve requests for locationtracking except in certain emergency situations. S.B. 1434 wouldalso require wireless providers to divulge "the number of timeslocation information has been disclosed," and how many times theyrejected police requests. Their criticism comes as concerns about warrantless locationsurveillance, a practice that the Obama administration and lawenforcement agencies have defended , are growing. Federal legislation introduced last year would require police to obtain a warrant signed by a judge before monitoring someone's movements, and courts have split over whether warrantless tracking is constitutional or not. Requiring a warrant to track California residents would "creategreater confusion for wireless providers when responding tolegitimate law enforcement requests," says the letter ( PDF ) written by CTIA , a wireless trade association that counts AT&T, VerizonWireless, U.S. Cellular, and Sprint Nextel among its board members.CTIA sent the letter to bill sponsor Mark Leno , a Democratic state senator whose district includes the city ofSan Francisco. CTIA also opposes the reporting requirements of S.B.1434, saying they would "unduly burden wireless providers and theiremployees, who are working day and night to assist law enforcementto ensure the public's safety and to save lives." "Wireless companies should be working day and night for us, theircustomers, not law enforcement," replies Nicole Ozer , technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU ofNorthern California. "This bill is good for consumers and it's good for business," Ozertold CNET. CTIA "shouldn't be opposing this bill. They shouldn't beopposing the warrant requirement. And they shouldn't be opposingthe basic reporting requirements to make sure the law is beingfollowed." (In a subsequent blog post , Ozer asked ACLU supporters to take to Twitter to criticize CTIA'sposition.) By advancing this argument, CTIA risks creating the perception thatits member companies are happy to open their databases ofcustomers' GPS coordinates to law enforcement -- just so long asnobody knows about it. Jamie Hastings, vice president, external and state affairs forCTIA-The Wireless Association, sent CNET a statement this morningsaying: CTIA and its members oppose S.B. 1434. If this bill was enacted, itwould mandate burdensome reporting requirements for wirelesscarriers. We also have concerns with the warrant provisions in thebill because the definitions appear overly broad. We are seekingclarification within this section to ensure that wireless providerscan provide lawful and timely information to legitimate lawenforcement requests and that there are no conflicts with federallaw while protecting consumers' privacy. AT&T, one of CTIA's largest member companies, is also part ofthe Digital Due Process coalition , which has taken the opposite position. It's lobbying for lawssaying that location data should be disclosed only with a searchwarrant. Wireless providers already compile many of the records required tobe disclosed by S.B. 1434. It's for billing purposes: becausethey're paid for assisting surveillance requests, they keep therecords so they can send accurate invoices to law enforcement. The ACLU recently posted over 5,000 pages of internal government documents , which show that Verizon Wireless sent the Raleigh, N.C. policedepartment an invoice ( PDF ) of $45 after it turned over cell site information on a customer.MetroPCS charges $50 for "detail records," and AT&T charges a$100 activation fee and $25 a day for location tracking. In addition, some companies, including Google, already publish dataabout how frequently they comply with law enforcement requests. Google voluntarily does this with its interactive Transparency Report . And the OpenNet Transparency Project -- a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society atHarvard University and other universities -- is hoping to make thatkind of voluntary disclosure more mainstream. Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phonesand planting GPS bugs on vehicles thousands of times a year, thelegal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws writtena generation ago are ambiguous at best. Courts have split over howeasy it should be for police to track Americans electronically andwhether the same rules should apply to live tracking and obtainingstored information about someone's earlier whereabouts. In April 2011, the Obama Justice Department launched a frontal attack on the idea of requiring search warrants for locations, with JamesBaker, the associate deputy attorney general, telling a Senatepanel that such a requirement would hinder "the government'sability to obtain important information in investigations ofserious crimes." Previously, the department had argued in courtthat warrantless tracking should be permitted because Americansenjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their, or at leasttheir cell phones', previous locations. Not too long ago, the concept of tracking cell phones would havebeen the stuff of spy movies. In 1998's "Enemy of the State," GeneHackman's character warned that the National Security Agency has"been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the'40s -- they've infected everything." But after a decade ofappearances in the likes of "24" and "Live Free or Die Hard,"location-tracking has become such a trope that it was satirized in a scene with Seth Rogen in "Pineapple Express" (2008). CNET was the first to report on the Justice Department's use ofwarrantless prospective cell tracking, meaning information about aperson's future whereabouts, in a 2005 news article . Last updated at 11 a.m. PT. 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