Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional (404media.co) 27
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A judge in Nevada has ruled that "tower dumps" -- the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers -- is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search. Cell towers record the location of phones near them about every seven seconds. When the cops request a tower dump, they ask a telecom for the numbers and personal information of every single phone connected to a tower during a set time period. Depending on the area, these tower dumps can return tens of thousands of numbers. Cops have been able to sift through this data to solve crimes. But tower dumps are also a massive privacy violation that flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unlawful search and seizure. When the cops get a tower dump they're not just searching and seizing the data of a suspected criminal, they're sifting through the information of everyone who was in the location. The ruling stems from a court case involving Cory Spurlock, a Nevada man charged with drug offenses and a murder-for-hire plot. He was implicated through a cellphone tower dump that law enforcement used to place his device near the scenes of the alleged crimes.
A federal judge ruled that the tower dump constituted an unconstitutional general search under the Fourth Amendment but declined to suppress the evidence, citing officers' good faith in obtaining a warrant. It marks the first time a court in the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the constitutionality of tower dumps, which in Spurlock's case captured location data from over 1,600 users -- many of whom had no way to opt out.
A federal judge ruled that the tower dump constituted an unconstitutional general search under the Fourth Amendment but declined to suppress the evidence, citing officers' good faith in obtaining a warrant. It marks the first time a court in the Ninth Circuit has ruled on the constitutionality of tower dumps, which in Spurlock's case captured location data from over 1,600 users -- many of whom had no way to opt out.
How does that work? (Score:2)
Re:How does that work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does that work? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Justices from both sides won't hesitate to blatantly reject objective fact to ensure this... "Well every independent study shows and every independent expert agrees drug dogs don't work... but the police say they do and the company selling them says they pass their tests... and it would sure make things hard
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So let me get this straight: the government is always tyrannical, “good faith” is just a trick word used by shadowy operatives, and unless we prosecute every cop like a Bond villain retroactively, the Constitution might as well be toilet paper? Got it. Thanks for the civics lesson from the Alex Jones School of Jurisprudence.
I'm not sure how the words "in good faith" make it okay to violate the constitution.
They don’t. What they do is recognize that not all constitutional violations are equal in consequence—especially when the law itself was unclear at the time. The
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Re: How does that work? (Score:5, Informative)
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, and the evidence was only challenged after being obtained
It's too bad the accused didn't file in a timely manner before their accusation.
it was legal when they got it via the search warrant and is now illegal
Courts determine when something was already illegal from the beginning.
If it was reasonable to expect they would have gotten the same results from the more narrow search that would have been legal, then that's really the only case where you can make an exception to allow the evidence.
Like if they found evidence of an unrelated crime due to gathering more data than was needed, it would be reasonable to expect that evidence to be
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Except that I'm held responsible for violating a law I didn't know existed, and had no reason to believe such a law would exist.
Cops should be held to the same standard as everyone else.
Re:How does that work? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can a judge rule something to be unconstitutional but at the same time permit a violation of the constitution? That makes absolutely no sense. Either it's wrong and has always been wrong and is never permitted or what was done in this case was legal and remains legal because it does not violate constitutional rights. Regardless of how you feel about this, the ruling makes no sense for that reason.
Because the warrant violated the constitutional rights of other people but not the defendant. The warrant should have been issued to search only for the defendant's phone, and that would have been constitutional. Had the tower dump been done without a warrant, then the data would have to be tossed. The others besides the defendant could possibly sue for Fourth Amendment violations, but not the defendant.
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How can a judge rule something to be unconstitutional but at the same time permit a violation of the constitution? That makes absolutely no sense. Either it's wrong and has always been wrong and is never permitted or what was done in this case was legal and remains legal because it does not violate constitutional rights. Regardless of how you feel about this, the ruling makes no sense for that reason.
Because the warrant violated the constitutional rights of other people but not the defendant. The warrant should have been issued to search only for the defendant's phone, and that would have been constitutional. Had the tower dump been done without a warrant, then the data would have to be tossed. The others besides the defendant could possibly sue for Fourth Amendment violations, but not the defendant.
You’re actually circling the right idea here—unlike the GP, who’s flailing around like he just discovered the Constitution was written in English.
The key thing to understand is that constitutional violations and evidentiary suppression are not the same thing. The judge in this case didn’t say “the search was fine.” She said the search was unconstitutional, but that the evidence wouldn’t be suppressed because the officers relied on a warrant issued under precedent th
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In 2025 rules don’t matter anymore.
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How can a judge rule something to be unconstitutional but at the same time permit a violation of the constitution?
There's a reason judgements run into 10s or 100s of pages. If you dig deeper than trying to distil something into one sentence you'll find it most likely makes more sense.
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Hmmm. You are pretending constitutional law is boolean logic and ignoring decades of precedent that allow for good-faith mistakes and evolving judicial interpretation. This is rhetorical drive-by theater -- scripted to sound like principled confusion while actually laundering a false premise: that constitutional law operates like a light switch, on or off, valid or invalid, case closed.
How can a judge rule something to be unconstitutional but at the same time permit a violation of the constitution?
Because constitutional jurisprudence—like all jurisprudence—isn’t time-traveling absolutism. The Const
Couldn't foresee this (Score:3)
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Make policing hard (Score:4)
We really need to reverse this trend of making police work easier with laws and technology.
Re:Make policing hard (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Make policing hard (Score:5, Interesting)
It was not sarcasm. Ever since 9/11 we have done everything possible to make life easier for law enforcement up and down the board at the cost of all of our rights. Sure, requesting phone data is part of policing. But those requests often are either non-existent or get rubber stamped by the courts.
We have situations where a bad guy gets away, the police cry about how hard it is to catch them because they don't have this or that, and municipalities and legislatures just bend over backwards to give them what they want. We should be scrutinizing and questioning every single move a LEO makes in order to prevent the type of situation we're in now.
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I hear you. Truly. I used to say the same thing, sometimes louder and with fewer commas. You’re not wrong to be skeptical of expanded law enforcement powers, especially in the post-9/11 climate. But your post takes a legitimate concern and wraps it in a kind of performative absolutism that undercuts the very scrutiny you're calling for.
Ever since 9/11 we have done everything possible to make life easier for law enforcement up and down the board at the cost of all of our rights.
I remember that mood vividly. The Patriot Act, NSLs, mass surveillance—some of it was genuinely alarming. But not everything has moved in one direction. Courts ha
Blanket swarch warrants (Score:4, Insightful)
It used to mean soldiers going house-to-house in a city and searching every house for what they were looking for (Sometimes they didn't even know what they were looking for).
Nowadays they just hook up a hoovering device to a data stream and filter for things which interest them. Since a lot of data on cell sites is related to living a life, this is essentially the equivalent to going house-to-house in a blanket search warrant. (Without ransacking each and every house).
Search warrants usually have to state what they are looking for, the parties they are executing the warrant on, and the physical addreses to be searched.
*.* searches should never be allowed. (First asterisk is the party, second asterisk is what they are looking for) regardless of whether its a physical or computer address.
Of course, we'll have to see if the 4th amendment still stays relevant. If the the supreme court justices are jailed, all bets are off).
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Or face which consequences? (Score:3)
Bad Warrant + Good Faith = Real 4th Amend Problem (Score:2)
A federal judge in Nevada ruled that "tower dumps"—mass cell phone data grabs by law enforcement—are unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. But because the cops had a warrant and the law was unsettled at the time, the court didn’t suppress the evidence. Cue outrage, confusion, and several users rediscovering the concept of judicial discretion.
This article is from 404media, and to their credit, they’re actually covering a meaningful privacy case. But true to form, they can