You would not get a search warrant in that case unless your car was the only one in the garage. The police don't know if there is three or even one phone connected to the tower in that time, and they should not get a warrant.
If police say they have extremely good evidence to believe the drugs are in the garage, in the scenario you described, a court wouldn't issue a search warrant for the garage including any cars it contains?
I'm genuinely surprised. Is there a name for whatever legal principle prevents the court from doing so? I'd like to learn more about this.
Because from Wikipedia [1], I'd have assumed that this would be a cut-and-dried instance of probable cause [2]. Is it about the vehicle owners being different from the garage owner?
Edit: some quick googling seems to indicate that search warrants in the US can be issued to include all or specifically identified vehicles on a property, but no indication of what conditions need to be met.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_warrant#United_States
Hold up, exactly how did you come to that conclusion?
What's the rationale that separates 1 car from {too_many} for probable cause?
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I feel there's a risk of conflating:
1. Good reason to believe X is somehow involved a crime.
2. Probable cause to search for/inside something owned by X.
While there is a strong correlation between the answers to those two questions, they are definitely not the same.
In the case he's describing you'd just get a search warrant for the garage and everything in it. Or, if you could establish probable cause (which seems likely here) you'd just go look for the drugs.
Can I say, "well it's probably in one of those 3 cars" so then I can get a warrant?
After the Boston Marathon bombing, they searched a 20-block area for the suspect (and found him). Was that legal?
> In exigent circumstances, or emergency situations, police can conduct warrantless searches to protect public safety. This exception to the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause requirement normally addresses situations of “hot pursuit,” in which an escaping suspect is tracked to a private home. But it might also apply to the events unfolding in Boston if further harm or injury might be supposed to occur in the time it takes to secure a warrant. A bomber believed to be armed and planning more violence would almost certainly meet such prerequisites.
[0]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/04/boston-bomber-ma...
Uh, why wouldn't a cop be allowed to walk/drive/fly-over public roadways in a 20-block area and look from public land in any direction?
Also do note, they knew specifically who they were looking for and had location data from their cellphones [1]. Not a judge, but if I was and somebody wanted a search warrant to find a person at a location and their evidence was the dude's cellphone is there, I'd grant it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Tsarnaev#Manhunt_and_...
Huh? The entire point the parent was making is that they do "know" which cell phones were connected during specific times.
As I understand it, the point is that law enforcement does not know this, and thus they send a request to the service provider for all devices within this geofence within this timebox.
The service provider must then search the entirety of the relevant datastores for devices matching the geo- and time requirements.
> Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained.
Still dubious that this would be used that way just because telecoms would be aware of this potential for misuse and would not give the data up without a subpeona or warrant, which under this ruling would not be allowed.
Court: no
Government: how much $ for this data?
Telco/bigtechco: ah, now we're talking
Executive: ...Ah...
Another officer will get an "anonymous tip".
Two cops on The Wire do this, and basically register a tennis ball, hence the name, as their CI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJa1_u-VLE
A judge could always choose to grant the warrant, but with full knowledge that any evidence uncovered will likely be inadmissible. Even if a judge grants such a warrant, it would likely be contested by the service provider (Google), and another judge would need to sign off on it, and likely an appelate court would have to deny certiorari in order. And even if it was allowed, at trial all of this would again be litigated with a fresh set of judges, and once again have to navigate up the apellate courts, and would most likely impair or cripple the prosecution of a case where it was used.
There might be exigent circumstances where the public needs outweigh the prosecutorial damage -- preventing an imminent bombing or something, but for routine criminal matters the geofence warrant is all but dead.
Is there a strong reason to assume one way or another about whether this will get reviewed by the Supreme Court (and if so, whether it would be upheld)? My understanding is that the Fifth Circuit has become a bit notorious in recent years for its rulings being a bit out of the norm and reviewed disproportionately by the Supreme Court, but I don't know enough about whether this decision might be one of those.
Recall that the Supreme Court generally gets to decide what cases it hears and what it’s said about the cases it wants to hear is at https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/supct/rule_10. It basically boils down to cases where there is a conflict between any two chains of appeals (federal circuits and states). But the Supreme Court is lazy (or smart), so when there is a conflict they usually want to see how other judges think and to see if a majority vote will arise. The cases that get granted are therefore normally just from one of the last circuits to adopt a view (often one of the previously espoused views from the other circuits), and I would need to see the data to believe that there is a bias with respect to whether they adhere to the majority view (if it exists).
My intent was for the statement of their decisions being considered extreme and their decisions being reviewed often to be two separate statements, the former an opinion I've seen often and the latter a statistical phenomenon. The latter doesn't imply the former, but I don't think it would be surprising that the former correlates with the latter.
If your house were burned down, and the police canvassed your neighbors do you expect your neighbors to stonewall the police or help you, by helping the police?
In the same scenario you would expect the tower owner to try and help solve that crime of their own volition. So knowing some of the requirements should be attainable in any civilized society.
But that request is not going to make it through normal channels. And most of the customer data (especially PII) is very tightly controlled, so likely no such person exists who can run that job without authorization, and even if they did, they would be immediately fired afterwards, and possibly subject to criminal prosecution for violation of their user's privacy, depending on jurisdiction.
For example, a small cottage in the woods is burned down with gasoline on a night the owner is absent. The police want to find the arsonist by asking for phones that connected to that tower that night, and there happen to be only 3 results, two of which are known neighbors. Still too broad?
In other words, should some of this hinge on the varying size/specificity of the result-set, rather than the query-parameters in isolation?