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Title: Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/18/19412...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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