Massachusetts’ Highest Court Upholds Cell Tower Dump Warrant

This weblog submit was drafted with assist from former EFF Authorized Intern Emma Hagemann.

Massachusetts’ highest court docket has upheld the gathering of mass cell tower knowledge, regardless of recognizing that this knowledge not solely offers investigators with “extremely private and personal” data but additionally has the potential to disclose “the places, identities, and associations of tens of hundreds of people.”

The case is Commonwealth v. Perry, and in it the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court docket (SJC) addressed the constitutionality of “tower dumps” of cell website location data (CSLI).

 A “tower dump” happens when a cellphone firm offers regulation enforcement with knowledge on all gadgets that related with a particular cell tower throughout a specified time frame. As a result of every cell tower covers a specific geographic space, police can infer from the information that the gadget house owners had been in that space on the time. Tower dumps can establish a whole bunch or hundreds of telephones—or, on this case, “greater than 50,000 people . . . with none one in every of them ever figuring out that she or he was the goal of police surveillance.”

In Perry, after a sequence of six retailer robberies and one murder, regulation enforcement sought and obtained two tower dump warrants. Collectively, the warrants lined seven cell towers on seven completely different days over the course of a month. Officers cross-referenced the tens of hundreds of cellphone numbers they obtained to establish gadgets that pinged a number of towers on the times the crimes occurred. Via this course of, they had been capable of establish Mr. Perry as a suspect. Mr. Perry moved to suppress the proof.

EFF, together with ACLU and the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Companies, filed an amicus transient within the case, arguing {that a} tower dump is a basic search that violates the Fourth Modification and Article 14, Massachusetts’ constitutional equal. Like the overall warrants reviled by the Structure’s drafters, tower dumps are irremediably overbroad as a result of they sweep up the knowledge of a whole bunch or hundreds of those that don’t have any connection to the crime beneath investigation. These searches lack possible trigger as a result of the police can’t present a motive to suspect the hundreds of harmless individuals whose data is caught within the dragnet had any hyperlink to the crime. Additionally they fail constitutional particularity necessities as a result of the scope of the search isn’t appropriately restricted. We additional argued that, even when the court docket upheld tower dumps, it ought to impose strict minimization necessities as a safeguard towards abuse; the federal government should show that the tower dump is important and should delete any gadget knowledge unrelated to the crime as quickly as potential. 

Though the court docket declined to undertake a rule that cell tower dumps are at all times unconstitutional, it did not preclude such an argument in a future case. It acknowledged that these searches not solely permit police to trace people into personal, constitutionally-protected areas and, by monitoring name knowledge, present police “important perception into the person’s associations,” in addition they make it potential for police to piece collectively individuals’s patterns of habits. As a result of the police requested tower dumps in a number of areas over the course of a number of days, the information not solely may set up “the place a person was and with whom she or he related on one event, but additionally the place the person had been and with whom the person had related on a number of completely different events.” If a warrant weren’t sufficiently restricted in scope—if it allowed police to pick out any cellphone quantity at random from the 50,000 and decide the id of that particular person, their location, and with whom that they had communicated—it could “undoubtedly violate” constitutional particularity necessities.

However, the court docket right here held the police had sufficiently restricted the scope of the search. Police had motive to consider the crimes had been related and dedicated by the identical individuals, and police defined of their affidavit supporting the warrant that that they had requested a number of tower dumps to search for commonalities among the many information—cellphone numbers that appeared in multiple location. As a result of one of many warrants additionally established possible trigger to consider the suspect had used a cellphone in fee of the crime, the court docket upheld that warrant. The court docket suppressed the proof from the opposite warrant, discovering it failed to ascertain these similar info.

The court docket did mandate necessary limitations on these searches going ahead. These embody requiring a choose to situation the warrant and requiring the warrant to incorporate protocols for the immediate and everlasting disposal of any knowledge that isn’t associated to the crime beneath investigation. Nevertheless, whereas these minimization necessities are necessary, general, the end in Perry is disappointing. Requiring solely that police state that they intend to “establish and/or confirm commonalities” within the knowledge on hundreds of individuals is a low bar.

Perry may even have troubling implications for different dragnet search applied sciences like geofence warrants. The court docket asserted that the hundreds of harmless people swept up in a tower dump will not be subjected to a “search” within the constitutional sense as a result of, though police collected their knowledge, police didn’t take the additional step of analyzing it. Like tower dumps, geofence warrants permit the federal government to go looking the placement data of many harmless individuals to attempt to establish a suspect. A number of courts have already acknowledged the mass privateness violations inherent in geofence knowledge dumps, no matter whether or not any police conduct any evaluation on the collected knowledge. These courts have dominated geofence warrants are unconstitutional for causes much like these we raised in our Perry amicus transient, and we hope that the Supreme Judicial Court docket would take a recent take a look at these arguments if or when it guidelines on the constitutionality of geofence warrants.

We are going to proceed to problem cell tower dumps, geofence warrants, and different types of location surveillance in different instances going ahead.