Federal Court Says Cell Tower Dumps Violate the Fourth Amendment
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and voluntarily. The Carpenter decision pointed out this simply wasn't true: cell tower location data is demanded from all cell phones in the tower coverage area and location data (along with identifying info about the device itself) was taken, rather than volunteered.
This has led to a number of interesting decisions, including a couple of state-level court decisions regarding mass collections of cell tower location data. Cell tower dumps generate records of all cell phones in certain areas during certain times, the same way geofence warrants work, but using more accurate cell site location info (CSLI).
Now, even with a warrant, courts are finding cell tower dumps to be unconstitutional. In 2022, the top court in Massachusetts said these warrants may still be constitutional, but only if law enforcement followed a stringent set of requirements. Earlier this year, a magistrate judge in Mississippi came down on cell tower dumps even more forcefully, declaring that if geofence warrants (those seeking Google location data) were unconstitutional, then it just made sense warrants seeking more accurate data with a similarly-sized dragnet also violated the Fourth Amendment.
Those rulings are limited to those states (and, in the case of the magistrate judge, likely just limited to his jurisdiction). But now there's something at a much higher level, which is definitely headed to a showdown at the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court as soon as the DOJ gets around to appealing this ruling. Here's Matthew Gault, reporting on this decision for 404Media.
The government tried to argue that if the warrant was unconstitutional, it didn't matter because this really wasn't a search under the Fourth Amendment. It hinted the Third Party Doctrine applied instead. The court disagrees, citing the expert for the defense, who pointed out not only was the data not voluntarily handed over to cell service providers, but even the de-duplicated list of responding devices turned this into an extremely broad search.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.