[HN Gopher] Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Uncons...
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Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional
Author : bradac56
Score : 252 points
Date : 2025-04-18 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| hiatus wrote:
| > 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Not only that, when they lie in conversations/interrogations,
| they can lie about _what the law is_ , as well as what official
| acts can/will undertake.
|
| To me there is a fundamental difference between lies like:
|
| 1. "Your buddy in the next room already ratted you out."
|
| 2. "Sign this admission and you'll only get 6 months, tops. If
| you don't, we can seize your house and your mother will be
| living on the streets. "
| nemomarx wrote:
| I get your point but actually why can they lie and claim your
| buddy ratted you out?
| p_ing wrote:
| Tax payers don't care enough to force the congress critters
| to change the laws in <your home state>.
|
| Instead, you get human beings who are shielded by a thin
| piece of paper who can summarily execute you, then say
| "whoops, my bad".
|
| Police are nothing more than State-sponsored gang members.
| pstuart wrote:
| Many of those tax payers are fine with them being gang
| members, but only against "others" -- that's a feature,
| not a bug.
| Zak wrote:
| The assumption, as I understand it is that a guilty person
| is more likely to confess if they believe the evidence
| against them is strong, but an innocent person will not
| believe the lie because they know they didn't commit the
| crime and generate the purported evidence.
|
| I fear like many other old assumptions about criminal
| justice that isn't a close match to reality.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I imagine a lot of it is tradition, AFAICT it was never
| really banned in the US (or Britain), although in the US it
| was codified in 1969. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_v._Cupp
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| I dont see the difference, both should be illegal
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Never talk to the police. Let your lawyers do the talking.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Because someone, somewhere needs to see this today
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| To add to this: it is the police's job to _positively_
| identify those who commit crimes. If they are questioning
| you, it is because 1) they are investigating a crime and
| you are a suspect (maybe not the prime suspect but _a_
| suspect) and 2) they do not have evidence that reasonably
| proves that you committed whatever crime (or lack thereof)
| they are investigating. (Simple game theory for 2: if they
| had the evidence, they 'd use it to obtain an arrest
| warrant and then prosecute the case; no need for more
| investigation.)
|
| This isn't good advice only for people who have possibly
| committed a crime but also (and especially) for those who
| are confident that they have not. The police are asking you
| questions to "get to the bottom of it" and they encounter
| people every day who do think they can lie to get out of a
| crime; they think you might try to lie to get out of a
| crime. They won't trust your words but they will _verify_
| your words. If your words turn out to be false, then they
| 'll tell the judge/jury that you lied to them, not that you
| were mistaken; in the absence of stronger evidence (against
| someone else) they might claim you were possibly even
| intending to direct their investigation toward a red
| herring with your falsehoods.
|
| The only revision to this advice I've heard in the past
| decade-and-a-bit: tell the police your real first and last
| name if they ask. It's not always a requirement but some
| states have "stop and ID" laws, which means you have to
| identify yourself to law enforcement during a "lawful
| detention" (other states instead require it after an
| arrest).
| autoexec wrote:
| > The police are asking you questions to "get to the
| bottom of it" and they encounter people every day who do
| think they can lie to get out of a crime;
|
| I don't even think they are all that interested in
| getting to the truth of the matter, they are mostly
| concerned with getting an arrest and conviction. If it'll
| be easier to throw you behind bars than to find and
| arrest the dangerous person who actually committed the
| crime they aren't all going to choose more work and risk
| "officer safety" when they can just take you and call it
| a day. Especially not if they're already prejudiced
| against you or you bruised their fragile ego somehow.
| EFreethought wrote:
| I wonder how much of the state of affairs is due to the
| "enshitification" of law enforcement. I think a lot of
| towns/cities require officers to give out a minimum
| number of citations/tickets per month.
|
| If you are told to care about a number, you will care
| about a number.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Those numbers influence promotions/raises. It is probable
| that higher-paid cops commit more civil rights violations
| than lower-paid by virtue of them being more likely by
| comparison to have undue arrests and convictions on their
| record (and ~equally likely to encounter actual criminal
| behavior).
| testing22321 wrote:
| This x 1000.
|
| A friend was a career LAPD detective, and he gave me the
| talk. He said because I'm a nice guy I might try to help
| the police by explaining what I saw in detail. He was
| adamant that I never ever do that, because in the absence
| of someone to pin it on, they would find a way to pin it
| on me. He saw it as literally their job.
|
| No matter what, even if you are just standing there when
| something happens, don't talk to the police.
| Loughla wrote:
| I've told this story on here before. When I was 16 or 17,
| the place I was working got robbed. The guy just opened
| the register while I was fixing part of the greenhouse
| building.
|
| The police showed up and took my statement, in which I
| said I didn't hear a car, so I assume he just ran off.
|
| They took me in about two weeks later for an official
| statement. Then told me I had to take a polygraph because
| my stories didn't match. The story didn't change. The
| officer at the scene wrote that I said I saw the guy run
| off.
|
| I was shitting bricks. A cop friend of my parents told me
| that this was common. They didn't have a suspect, I was a
| young kid, so they were just trying to get me to admit to
| it. He said they would tell me I failed the polygraph
| test and to just come clean.
|
| That's what they did. They tried to pin it on me, but I
| legit didn't do it, so I would never confess. Even after
| they tried the 'you'll only get probation of you confess
| now, but if this goes to trial you'll be tried as an
| adult' nonsense.
|
| And that's the story of how I learned to never, ever,
| ever speak to a police officer without legal counsel,
| even if you're straight up the victim in the situation.
|
| What a fucking mess this country is in terms of policing.
| some-guy wrote:
| When I was a child, I thought police had to go to law school.
| How else would you enforce the law if you didn't know what
| the law was?
| Clubber wrote:
| They're supposed to be trained on it, and they probably get
| a week maybe, depending on the academy. The rest is how to
| beat your ass.
| redeux wrote:
| I took a class in college from a lawyer who said he started
| as a cop but wanted to understand the law better so he went
| to law school at night. When he graduated the chief (or
| whatever) told him he couldn't practice law and be a cop,
| and even though he had no intention of actually being an
| attorney, they let him go.
| underdeserver wrote:
| We all have to go to law school.
|
| How could you live in the world without breaking the law if
| you didn't know what the law was?
| wutwutwat wrote:
| Who does the court work for? The government. Who do the police
| work for? The government.
|
| Yeah yeah, they work for "the people" "the tax payer" whatever.
| They work for the government. They get their paychecks from the
| same place.
|
| What are you expecting here? This isn't equal.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There's a very good chance the cops in question do _not_ work
| for the Federal government. They certainly don 't work for
| the _judicial_ branch. It isn 't a perfect setup, but it's
| better than many.
| ty6853 wrote:
| The whole thing is intertwined. Podunk cops often get put
| on 3 letter task forces and work in a mutual arrangement
| with each other. They often have a really clever scam going
| on where they kick seizures up to federal agencies, since
| it is so much harder to block/contest federal forfeitures
| than local ones, and then the federal agencies kick back a
| fraction of it.
|
| Maybe their paychecks don't come from the federal
| government nominally but in practice it's highly
| intermixed.
| wutwutwat wrote:
| They all get paid from my pay check. They work for the
| government. Level doesn't matter. They protect their own.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Level doesn't matter_
|
| This level of civic and legal ignorance is a large part
| of why our country is in the mess that it is.
| ty6853 wrote:
| It's ironic that Milton Friedman, the guy that invented
| income tax withholding, was one of the staunchest fighters
| against it in the end.
|
| They all get their paycheck straight out your paycheck before
| you even think about it. It's absolutely brilliant. No one
| would actually pay for most the horse-shit we get in return
| if you had to sign the check.
| mjd wrote:
| The rule that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible
| exists to disincentivize the police from obtaining evidence
| illegally.
|
| But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular
| search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge
| authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting
| evidence doesn't serve that purpose.
|
| _Update_ : This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception
| has been in U.S. law for decades. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may
| not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out
| of thin air.
| ty6853 wrote:
| If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I
| should not be convicted.
| mjd wrote:
| This is not responsive. The police did not commit a crime
| here.
|
| Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts
| of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference
| between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a
| mistake.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The police did not commit a crime here.
|
| They did, however, violate the Fourth Amendment. Per the
| court.
| mjd wrote:
| The Fourth Amendment was violated by the magistrate judge
| who issued the illegal warrant, not by the police
| officers who, acting in in good faith, executed it.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| No, the judge told them they were allowed to do it. The
| act of doing it is what violated the fourth amendment. If
| they hadn't acted on the warrant, the fourth amendment
| wouldn't have been violated. The judge was _wrong_, but
| the police are the ones that violated the amendment.
| mjd wrote:
| "No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, ...
| and particularly describing the place to be searched, and
| the persons or things to be seized."
|
| Judge Magit violated the amendment by _issuing the
| warrant_.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| If my lawyer tells me selling a specific analog version
| of fentanyl is legal because it's different
| enough/whatever, and I good faith sell an analog version
| of fentanyl, do I get a good faith exemption?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Bad analogy but I'll try it:
|
| I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people
| can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they
| go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and
| then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault
| of their own and should not have been issued, I don't
| think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the
| hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge,
| so who knows what they'd actually rule
|
| In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're
| glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not
| hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can
| be reasonably expected to do your own research and not
| take a random person's written word for it. The analogy
| is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're
| trying to reasonably think about this case
| encom wrote:
| If you can cite previous court cases in your favour, you
| probably won't.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law.
| I should not be convicted_
|
| How often does this actually happen in criminal matters?
| mjd wrote:
| It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail
| fraud, for example.
|
| Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had
| work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to
| be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get
| you off the hook, if true?
| ty6853 wrote:
| Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and
| sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and
| believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I
| think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA
| items that it was 100% legal. His own state
| representatives had advertised to their constituents that
| the law exempted silencers that never crossed state
| boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even
| had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this
| would actually still touch federal law / interstate
| commerce.
|
| Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that
| verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a
| pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had
| fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be
| like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent
| counseling at school and admitted she was an escort,
| after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr.
| Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there
| was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the
| escort was 18.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it
| reached the appellate circuit for a reason.
|
| CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of
| criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly)
| absolute liability.
|
| Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted
| of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted
| of and punished for a crime they didn't know they
| committed.
| ty6853 wrote:
| These kind of convictions aren't rare in the firearms
| domain. People get arrested or convicted all the time for
| doing stuff they had no idea was illegal. More recently a
| Navy Sailor (Patrick Adamiak) in the pipeline to be a
| SEAL was convicted after selling an imported parts kit
| that had been destroyed per ATF guidelines from the early
| 2000s. But apparently when he resold it, (after buying it
| openly from gunbroker), the ATF decided the way the kit
| was cut up was wrong and put him away for 20 years. Oh
| yes they had a few other excuses -- he had a
| decomissioned RPG tube, so the ATF just put an entirely
| other gun inside the fucking tube and fired it to claim
| it still work.
|
| In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this
| to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and
| even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving
| him.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Hide some drugs in someone's luggage when they're
| traveling at an airport and then get back to me. There's
| tons of cases of people being arrested for things they
| either had no idea they doing or had no idea was illegal.
| And then even more where the police tack on lots of
| charges for someone that's already been arrested; for
| things that they had no idea they were a problem in the
| first place.
| autoexec wrote:
| Hell, there are tons of examples of people being arrested
| for things that aren't crimes at all, and even for acts
| that are constitutionally protected. Police don't care
| because they know they'll get away with it (and might
| even get a paid vacation) when the case against the
| person who was arrested and likely lost their job as a
| result gets thrown out. If the unlawfully arrested person
| is lucky and/or wealthy enough to afford a good lawyer
| they might get a decent amount of tax payer money out of
| it.
| __loam wrote:
| This is a weird concept to people in stem fields, but in
| law intent matters a lot. It's the difference between
| manslaughter and murder.
| ty6853 wrote:
| It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have
| a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing
| their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it
| is a strict liability crime.
|
| Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-
| card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning
| link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the
| actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into
| the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it
| out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They
| gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he
| could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could
| only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into
| the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15
| can do with the parts already in it.
|
| Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had
| any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a
| machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it,
| who never as far as I know actually distributed one.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Meanwhile, you can use bump-stocks as a redneck machine
| gun all day long.
| aftbit wrote:
| Are you talking about the AutoKeyCard case, Kristopher
| Ervin and Matthew Hoover? Ervin finally gets out of
| prison on 2025-05-03 and Hoover gets out on Christmas
| 2026.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Yes. Honestly I am astonished Ervin, the leader of that
| enterprise, is getting out so much sooner than Hoover who
| IIRC just advertised it.
| addicted wrote:
| If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the
| law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost
| certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would
| have otherwise and in some cases also be acquitted.
|
| So this isn't really a good argument even if we ignore the
| fact that it's a non sequitur.
|
| A better argument is that the good faith exception, while
| making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the
| police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was
| done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself
| should be removed because of how difficult it is to
| actually gauge and enforce.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If you believe in good faith that you have not broken
| the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you
| almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you
| would have otherwise
|
| Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they
| did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as
| wrong in themselves ( _mala in se_ ) though it might with
| crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (
| _mala prohibita_ ).
| ty6853 wrote:
| Well there's also the case that a main component in
| having your sentence reduced is expressing genuine
| remorse.
|
| I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for
| a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously
| maintaining they in good faith thought they were
| following the law. Any expression of those two views
| simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more
| than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was
| legal."
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| Excluding the evidence would incentivize police to stop
| choosing the most convenient interpretation of the law. They
| should have to try to make the most accurate interpretation,
| which means punishment when they are wrong. Just like for
| everyone else
| mjd wrote:
| No. In 2020 the police went to a magistrate judge to ask
| for a warrant. The judge issued the warrant. Five years
| later, another judge has determined that the warrant should
| not have been issued in the first place.
|
| That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason
| to punish them for it.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| The evidence can be suppressed without punishing the
| police.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > That is not the fault of the police, and there is no
| reason to punish them for it.
|
| It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to
| use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to
| gather.
|
| Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for
| breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them.
| That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we
| pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do,
| so it's kind of a moot point.
| multjoy wrote:
| They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a
| warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.
| gylterud wrote:
| But the point is justice for the people put through curt.
| It does not matter to them whose mistake it was.
| autoexec wrote:
| Really we should be punishing the judge to approved it in
| the first place. I judge that violates the rights of the
| people shouldn't be allowed to be a judge.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Horseshit. This isn't a criminal conviction, the standard of
| mens rea doesn't and shouldn't apply. To add a good faith
| loophole only incentivizes two things: purposeful ignorance
| and lying.
| mjd wrote:
| Learn to tell the difference between "I don't like it" and
| "horseshit".
|
| The legal precedent for this goes back decades, and it's
| been argued by many people better-informed than you.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception
| einpoklum wrote:
| Reminds me of the de-facto good-faith exemptions for US
| police for not shooting civilians, or for the US government
| for arming death squads, or dictators, or genocidal military
| campaigns etc.
| anon373839 wrote:
| It is an established principle. But it also is an exception
| to how our legal system works: you are usually bound,
| retroactively, by new legal principles when courts "discover"
| them.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Agreed. Part of the problem here is that there are few
| consequences (other than perhaps non-promotion) for judges
| who issue bad warrants, and we don't have good information on
| how many warrant applications are rejected or wrongly
| granted.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| cell tower dump and general geofence warrants to Google/Apple
| were how many Jan 6th protesters were found and charged. Courts
| threw out all their arguments about this very issue. This is
| standard practice and was celebrated as cops being smart
|
| here's a Washington Post article lamenting that Google was
| cutting back on how long they hold location data and how
| hundreds of people wouldn't have been prosecuted without it-
| https://archive.ph/r7afb
| dataflow wrote:
| You seem to be misrepresenting the situation. Ignorance of the
| law is _not_ the defense they are invoking here.
|
| Ignorance of the law is when you claim you didn't follow the
| law because you were unaware it existed.
|
| This is a case where the court believes police _did_ know the
| law and _did_ try to follow it in good faith -- that 's how
| they got to their conclusion that it's constitutional -- and
| that no court had yet reached a different conclusion in that
| district, until now.
|
| These are distinctly different situations.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| In most cases police is seen as serving the government and
| having all sorts of protections from sovereign immunity
| (confirmed in a case when a SWAT team partly destroyed the
| wrong house), qualified immunity (invented by SCOTUS, there is
| no such law) and practical legal immunity based on the fact
| that DAs rarely prosecute and even juries rarely find them
| guilty when prosecuted. This is why the ignorance of the law is
| accepted in so many cases as a defense for police, but not for
| citizens.
| anon6362 wrote:
| US police, in effect, are a lawless, violent, honorless,
| untouchable, mafia who protect and serve primarily a landed
| aristocracy. In some ultra-exclusive communities, city police
| are literally reduced to Dashers and grocery getters. Similar
| venues and communities in the States also pay for hybrid PMC/LE
| QRFs who roll with battle rattle more than body armor and long
| guns.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "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."
|
| At least the weasel words allow/recognize that the decision is
| made on a branch of unknown strength. The branch may snap if
| other judges overrule, or it may be found to be a main branch
| if other judges uphold the decision. I'm not a legal scholar,
| but that's the first I've heard of this type of
| acknowledgement. However, seems like the courage ran out at
| that point instead of denying the evidence to be used, and
| letting it go to appeal to test the thickness of that branch.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Remember in every system people push up to and just as far over
| the line as they can get away with.
|
| 'Good faith' is given when chain of custody is broken. 'Good
| faith' is given way too much. Either the 4th Amendment is
| serious enough to have power/force over law
| enforcement/judicial, or it doesn't. And with good faith, it
| doesn't.
|
| 'our side violated the law but because of the divisions of
| power, our side didn't violate the law and we are going to give
| good faith to our side that our side was acting in good faith'.
| It's all window dressing to say 'the fourth amendment is
| superseded by other factors that a judge get's to decide at
| their discretion and the fourth amendment is not in fact the
| law of the land, a judge can overrule it with 'good faith''.
| flipnotyk wrote:
| "It's unconstitutional and illegal, but you're not being held
| accountable and you can still use the data." Yeah that tracks.
| mjd wrote:
| It is not reasonable to hold someone accountable for doing
| something illegal in 2020 that was only determined to be
| illegal in 2025.
|
| The police officers applied to a judge for a warrant. The judge
| gave them the warrant. Now another judge says that the warrant
| should not have been issued in the first place. How is that the
| police's fault? How would you hold them accountable?
| pcaharrier wrote:
| This is the basic idea of the good faith exception to the
| exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule was supposed to
| deter police misconduct (e.g., searching a house without a
| warrant, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment) by
| preventing them from using evidence they never should have
| had. But the deterrence rationale doesn't hold up that well
| when the police reasonably (and that's key) believed that
| they were acting lawfully.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'Your constitutional rights were violated but tough luck,
| nothing can be done about it because the court is extending
| special 'good faith' courtesy to the police that you don't
| get (some animals are more equal than others in court
| decisions/considerations when minor laws (the fourth
| amendment) are broken)'.
|
| And people wonder why American's are apathetic to it all. A
| judge can just wave away constitutional violations all
| day/every day because 'good faith'.
| einpoklum wrote:
| You're conflating "holding accountable" and "letting
| benefit".
|
| The question isn't whether the police officers who initiated
| the tower dump should go to jail or be fired, but whether the
| evidence they obtained would be admissible. It shouldn't be.
|
| Also, a cell tower dump is not an act in good faith - neither
| in 2020 nor in 2025, regardless of whether the court lets it
| slide or not.
| mjd wrote:
| 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.
| aftbit wrote:
| Thanks for finding this! Here's a link to Courtlistener/RECAP,
| which has a copy of this hosted for free as well.
|
| Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67397036/united-
| states-...
|
| Order:
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nvd.162...
| transpute wrote:
| EFF tool to counter BYOT (Bring Your Own Tower),
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43283917
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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?
| mjd wrote:
| The purpose of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine is to
| disincentivize illegal collection of evidence. But there has
| always been a good-faith exception to it: if the police
| genuinely believed that what they were doing was legal, as they
| did in this case, relying on established legal precedent, then
| throwing out the evidence doesn't disincentivize anything.
|
| But the declaration that cell tower dumps are illegal now
| disincentivizes _future_ police from relying on dumps, since
| they now know (or should know) that such evidence will be
| thrown out. And more to the point, magistrate judges will stop
| issuing warrants for cell tower dumps.
| topspin wrote:
| "fruit of the poisonous tree" is one of those "magic words"
| that a lot of people think will preclude prosecution. Judges
| _frequently_ make exceptions and judgement calls on whether a
| given search was legal, and people are _frequently_ convicted
| on "poisoned" evidence, and evidence compromised in all
| sorts of other ways.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >since they now know (or should know)
|
| but can you hold them to that in any manner or does each
| officer need to be told officially and continue to plead
| ignorance of the law until they are in some documented way
| informed of it? can you plead ignorance of the law if you
| know it's not legal to dump all traffic from a cell phone
| tower but no one said that it's not legal to dump all the
| traffic from a web server (assuming for the sake of argument
| the obv interpretation that this ruling applies to all data
| stores that contain data from multiple people)? Every time
| you need to violate the constitution can you just have the
| new guy do it? Does declaring this illegal actually do
| anything to protect the rights of people who did nothing
| wrong and had their data seized and pored over by police
| anyway?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| >> Does declaring this illegal actually do anything to
| protect the rights of people
|
| Yes, next time they do it the data cannot be used in court
| as it was already declared anti-constitutional by that
| Circuit and good faith argument cannot be used. Good faith
| and not knowing the law are different; good faith can be
| used when the law is not clear enough and there was no rule
| to clarify.
|
| It happens very often with 2A restrictions that are
| overturned by courts, but they are in effect for years and
| when they are repelled by courts then similar laws are
| passed just to be repelled years later, but during all the
| years there is an anti-constitutional law in place with
| prohibitions. So police cannot do cell searches, but local
| governments can enact anti-constitutional laws with
| intention and wipe rights successfully, for example laws
| that mandates telecom companies to provide the data to the
| police.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| _if the police genuinely believed that what they were doing
| was legal, as they did in this case, relying on established
| legal precedent, then throwing out the evidence doesn 't
| disincentivize anything_
|
| This is obviously false. It would disincentivize the police
| from collecting evidence without first ensuring that the
| method of collection was legal.
| multjoy wrote:
| They did. They went to a judge and got a warrant.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That does not make it legal and it does not eliminate the
| responsibility of asking for the warrant and using it.
|
| Not saying there was a conspiracy here, but bad judges
| exist and arranging for a warrant is possible even for
| honest judges. If you are a policeman and you want to
| kill someone, get a judge to sign a "no knock" warrant,
| get in their house and shoot them, it happened many
| times; there were cases when the warrant was not even for
| the address of the poor guy that was killed and last year
| the warrant was for someone that borrowed a lawn mower
| from the judge who signed it and did not return it. So
| the warrant excuse is not so good.
| thatguymike wrote:
| 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.
| mjd wrote:
| It's the breadth. Searches have to be narrowly tailored to
| provide evidence of the specific crime being investigated.
| There's discussion of this on pages 12-13 of the judge's
| opinion.
|
| https://plover.com/~mjd/misc/cell-tower-dump-opinion.pdf
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| So the warrant is forbidden - could the police just ask nicely
| for the data and have telcos provide it?
| autoexec wrote:
| If police just ask they'll usually be rejected, but police have
| found it a lot easier to offer to pay for that data and
| companies have been happy to turn it over while stuffing their
| pockets with taxpayer money.
| Improvement wrote:
| Paywall free link: https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-
| blanket-search-of-...
| thrance wrote:
| Who cares at this point what the judicial branch rules or thinks?
| ICE received the benediction of our new king to use any means
| necessary to do its bidding, legal or extralegal. They are now
| arresting citizens [1] and putting them on planes straight to
| those El Salvador death camps, Law be damned. If tomorrow they
| can use Cell Tower Data to more efficiently round up political
| opponents, be assured they will.
|
| [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5255815-american-
| ci...
| excalibur wrote:
| Did they blow the cell phone snooping machine up when they were
| done like in _The Dark Knight_?
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| 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.
| mjd wrote:
| The judge's opinion explains this in detail. It depends on the
| so-called "good-faith exception" to the exclusionary doctrine.
|
| The idea is that if the police tell the truth in their warrant
| application of what they are looking for and why, the judge
| issues a search warrant, and the police lawfully execute the
| warrant, then there's no point in suppressing the evidence just
| because, years later, it's determined that the warrant should
| not have issued.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception
| dmix wrote:
| Ontario Canada figured this out in 2016.
|
| https://financialpost.com/technology/police-breached-cellpho...
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| VanTheBrand wrote:
| because the law is not a math equation and context matters.
| tlogan wrote:
| 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?
| sigwinch wrote:
| "and the persons or things to be seized" suggests otherwise.
| NSLs wouldn't be challenged this way.
| nzeid wrote:
| I am not a lawyer but here it goes:
|
| If the target of the warrant itself is the carrier/telecom -
| probably constitutional, but I imagine there'd need to be a
| pretty good explanation.
|
| If the target of the warrant itself is a single customer of the
| carrier/telecom - Absolutely unconstitutional.
|
| E.g. You can't get the transaction history of every customer of
| a bank just because one of its customers is a suspect.
|
| (Edited for clarity.)
| riffic wrote:
| guess they'll just keep doing it anyways and will now do
| "parallel construction" to get a case through court.
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