After previously receiving a ninety day reprieve, today the Justice Department is asking for another month to decide if they will appeal a Mississippi federal judge’s sweeping ruling that determined so-called “tower dumps” are unconstitutional.
Tower Dumps are a frequently-used law enforcement technique of pulling large swaths of data from cellular towers, which would include location information about innocent individuals within the area of the tower, to find alleged criminal activity.
FBI agents in Mississippi had initially submitted four sealed search warrants for a tower dump’s data as part of an investigation into a string of shootings and car thefts involving an unnamed violent gang. U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Harris repeatedly declined to authorize the search warrants, even after the DOJ submitted a follow-up memorandum clarifying their position, and a conference call was held with Judge Harris to address his concerns.
The February order marked the first instance in which a judge ruled against law enforcement’s use of tower dumps, extending the scope of an August ruling in a federal appeals court that found the use of a geofence warrant — in which law enforcement sends a request to Google for the location data of phones at a specific location — was unconstitutional.
In his original ruling, Harris wrote, “The Government is essentially asking the Court to allow it access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle…The Fourth Amendment does not permit law enforcement to rummage through troves of data and themselves determine the existence of probable cause to support the seizure of that data,” the order stated.
In March, prosecutors asked for a stay of the order indicating that they would eventually seek to “reverse or vacate” the order. The request was granted, but the stay was set to be lifted on Friday. The Tuesday DOJ motion for extension does not include similar language about seeking an appeal but simply asks for more time to determine next steps. In the interim, tower dumps have continued to be used by law enforcement, including to investigate arson attacks against Teslas.