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On Monday, at the request of a Court Watch federal court motion, a judge in Mississippi unsealed records about a landmark legal case that could have significant ramifications on law enforcement investigative techniques around the country.
Since February, Court Watch has been exclusively reporting on a curious federal case in Mississippi involving the Justice Department's attempt to receive phone data targeting every person who was within the coverage radius of four cellular towers in order to identify suspects in a string of killings, shooting and car thefts allegedly committed by a local gang over a 14-month period.
A federal judge has repeatedly denied their motions noting that “The Government is essentially asking the Court to allow it access to an entire haystack because it may contain a needle… the haystack here could involve the location data of thousands of cell phone users in various urban and suburban areas.”
The data, which is part of what is colloquially called “Tower Dumps,” is a well-worn law enforcement technique. Tower dumps are a collection of data on all devices, such as cell phones, that have connected to specific cellular towers during a set time block. Law enforcement has long relied on tower dumps to crack complex cases and track suspects via cell phone data. Last year, investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives successfully used a tower dump to identify a man accused of a string of gun store robberies in Pennsylvania. More recently, investigators asked a federal judge for approval to perform a tower dump while investigating vandalism at a Federal Aviation Administration facility in Vermont.
However, the federal judge in Mississippi ruled that a frequently-used law enforcement technique of pulling large swaths of data from cellular towers to find alleged criminal activity is unconstitutional. The decision could have significant ramifications for ongoing law enforcement investigations. Just last week, authorities cited tower dump records to bring charges against an individual accused of a string of ATM robberies. The Department of Justice has filed notice of its intent to appeal the Mississippi decision.
Our reporting resulted in a team of civil rights and privacy organizations such as the The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The ACLU of Mississippi, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to file amici briefs in support of the original ruling. The Justice Department has until August 29th to respond to their motions.
However, after filing four stories related to the case, the docket was unceremoniously sealed two weeks ago. There appeared to be no underlying order that would have resulted in its sealing. An inquiry to the clerk’s office and the magistrate judge’s chambers who issued the original ruling did not provide any additional information.
Last week, Court Watch, working with first amendment lawyer Christopher Beall of Recht Kornfeld, and a local counsel in Mississippi, filed a motion to unseal the docket.
Writing in part in our eight page motion, “There can be no sealing in this case premised on a notion that the public should be kept ignorant from knowing that the Government is seeking to use the particular tool of a “tower dump” warrant because that piece of information is part of a substantial and ongoing public debate around the efficacy and propriety of such government action as a matter of public policy…Shielding important matters of public policy from the sunlight of public awareness is anathema to the principles of open government on which the common law right of access is premised.”
On Monday, citing our motion, Chief Judge Carlton Reeves of the Southern District of Mississippi issued a ruling unsealing the docket. Reeves noted, “Through inadvertent error, the entire case—including the Magistrate Judge’s orders—was sealed.” He noted that “The Magistrate Judge’s orders and docket sheet should be publicly accessible. The question is whether the rest of the case (i.e., the other docket entries) should be sealed. After considering the applicable law and the government’s arguments, the Court concludes that they should not.”
Judge Reeves’ order also unsealed a number of other filings in the docket, leaning his reasoning heavily on the public’s right to access public records.
He also noted “the government has not offered compelling reasons in support of its motion to seal.”