Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

Summary

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.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.A Nevada man, Cory Spurlock, is facing charges related to dealing marijuana and a murder-for-hire scheme. Cops used a tower dump to connect his cellphone with the location of some of the crimes he is accused of. Spurlock’s lawyers argued that the tower dump was an unconstitutional search and that the evidence obtained during it should not be. The cops got a warrant to conduct the tower dump but argued it wasn’t technically a “search” and therefore wasn’t subject to the Fourth Amendment.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 ...