A federal judge in Nevada just confirmed the obvious. When cops scoop up the private data of thousands of people through a practice known as a "tower dump," that’s a search. A big one. An unconstitutional one. Then, with a straight face, the same judge allowed police to keep the evidence they got from it because they (supposedly) meant well.
This is how American justice handles mass surveillance now. Step one, violate the Fourth Amendment. Step two, say you didn’t know you were doing it. Step three, win.
Tower dumps are what you get when law enforcement trades a warrant for a fishing license. Police ask telecoms to hand over data from any phone that touched a specific cell tower during a time window. Cell towers log phone locations every seven seconds, so the net gets wide fast. In populated areas, tower dumps can collect data from tens of thousands of devices. The majority of those belong to people who are guilty of nothing more than existing.
In the case of Cory Spurlock, the number was 1,686. Spurlock is accused of dealing weed and plotting a murder-for-hire. Instead of tracking him the old-fashioned way, police pulled data from a tower near one of the crimes and caught his phone in the dragnet. His lawyers argued that this was an unconstitutional search. Prosecutors replied that the tower dump wasn’t really a “search,” and even if it was, it somehow didn’t count under the Fourth Amendment.
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