It took me a while to track down the actual opinion.
The case, United States v Spurlock, is 3:23-cr-00022 in the Nevada federal district. The opinion itself is ECF document #370, and I have hosted a copy at https://plover.com/~mjd/misc/cell-tower-dump-opinion.pdf in case other people are interested.
Interesting that the recent ruling against blanket cell tower data searches wouldn't have affected the Mark Gooch case. In that insatnce, investigators used targeted cell phone data (ie "geofencing") to track his movements, not a mass data collection. Under the new standards, this type of focused surveillance would still be permitted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBBTfy29WKI
They absolutely wouldn't have caught him without the cell phone data, highlighting in my mind, the fine line between privacy and safety, which is something I personally struggle to articulate clearly. While it's reassuring this ruling wouldn't affect this case, I can easily see how "tower dumps" could be misused. It's confusing, though, that the judge ruled this unconstitutional action permissible "just this once." Either it's unconstitutional or it's not. Judges shouldn't have the authority grant one-time exceptions.
How many times recently have we seen rulings from judges that establish that something is definitely illegal but the person who did is still allowed to do it or at least there's no mechanism by which they can be punished for doing it? Having laws and then picking and choosing when they'll be enforced and against whom is the same as not having laws in the first place. And before you cite the good faith exception, passing a law that says "It's legal to pick and choose when the law applies" doesn't legitimize it.
"It's unconstitutional and illegal, but you're not being held accountable and you can still use the data." Yeah that tracks.
I've never been completely comfortable with the concept of potentially freeing criminals because of wrongful conduct by the police.
The argument is there must be a way to protect society against the use of illegal methods by the police. I'm not confident, however, that the Exclusionary Rule actually accomplishes its purposes. I suspect the police 'roll the dice' all the time in their investigations, knowing full well they are unlikely to pay much of a personal price if their illegality gets discovered.
I've always thought charging police for their illegal conduct in a special federal system that handled all cases of wrongful conduct by police nationwide; with high conviction rates and penalties that start with termination and loss of pension and move on from there to add long prison terms. A system with special judges and prosecutors and civilian oversight.
Not likely to happen, so I guess we are stuck with letting criminals and the cops walk free.
EFF tool to counter BYOT (Bring Your Own Tower), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43283917
So the warrant is forbidden - could the police just ask nicely for the data and have telcos provide it?
Ontario Canada figured this out in 2016.
https://financialpost.com/technology/police-breached-cellpho...
The issue in this case is being tested in other cases. It's about the "third party doctrine", the theory that the fourth amendment does not cover our information if it is in the possession of a third party.
https://nclalegal.org/press_release/ncla-asks-supreme-court-...
I blogged about this some time ago: https://ccleve.com/p/a-privacy-amendment
I wonder if this also applies to the widely deployed stingray cell tower emulators, which effectively institute a Man In The Middle breach of cell phone communications...
If this holds, can cops still ask for whether a specific phone number was present on a cell tower at a certain time? I can't tell if it's the breadth of the data collection that's unconsitutional because it catches lots of innocent people's data; or if it's the concept of using cell towers altogether.
Do law schools even bother teaching about "fruit of the poisoned tree" anymore? It's clearly a dead letter; this is yet another ruling that if you gather evidence illegally you'll get a finger-wag but allowed to proceed as usual. Why even have a notion of legality of evidence if it doesn't matter?
Couldn't the data be anonymized in a way that the police can track and relate some hashed ids with crimes, and then, via judge approval, ask the telecom companies to deanonymize them?
I assume this will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Is issuing a warrant to do blanket search of cell tower data unconstitutional?
what's the difference between eyewitnesses reporting their recollections of EMF data gathered by their eyes, a surveillance camera collecting and recording EMF data, and a cell tower collecting and recording EMF data? In the case of the cell tower, the suspect is always carrying a "flashlight", but in the other cases he may be.
The Constitution needs to be mirrored in all Western Nations otherwise Tyranny is guaranteed.
Paywall free link: https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...
guess they'll just keep doing it anyways and will now do "parallel construction" to get a case through court.
Did they blow the cell phone snooping machine up when they were done like in The Dark Knight?
[flagged]
> U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”
It continues to amaze me that police are the only group who can use the defense of ignorance of the law.