Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

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.