This case is about geofence warrants. Some people robbed a postal worker and were observed with something like a cell phone. They sent a warrant to Google saying search your DB for anyone who was at these coordinates at the time of the robbery. The court held that geofence warrants are general warrants and therefore unconstitutional, although the good faith exception applies in this case. This was due to the 4th Circuit reaching the opposite conclusion. The 5th held that searching through the DB was a search for 4th Amendment purposes (which is not what the 4th held).
IANAL, but I am of two minds here. On the one hand, there are apparently lots of false positives, with examples of people being arrested for being nearby the crime. On the other hand, suppose the government has a database which contains millions of records of people that they use to come up with some names for further investigation. Let’s also say that the people in the database did not opt in. Does this ruling mean the government can’t search that database, at least in the 5th Circuit? Additionally, if I were arrested based on data provided in response to a geofence warrant and nothing else, I would certainly point out that I was nearby but that doesn’t mean I committed the crime. Apparently, though, any corroborating evidence collected beginning with the geofence warrant would be fruit of the poisonous tree. (If the government received a warrant to search for that evidence on the strength of the first warrant, would that still be true?)
Lawfare article:
The Fifth’s ruling seems bizarre to me. The article provides much more expertise than I possess, but my thought was that the Court doesn’t understand how computer searches work if they consider this an intrusion on privacy. There isn’t a cop sitting in front of a computer screen eyeballing each item in the database to see if it matches.
No human looks at every record, but a machine does. What the machine does can only be described as searching. And it searches through the records of millions of people, and there can’t be probable cause for searching the records of all of those millions of people.
Yes, a machine that disregards anything it determines is a non-match. A machine that already has access to all of these records, access that it routinely utilizes. A machine that immediately “forgets” all the non-matches for purposes of the completed search.
The search creates zero jeopardy for any non-matches, no human is made aware of them. 4th Amendment violations create at least the potential for harm. What potential harm has the search, by a mindless machine, created for anyone in the database who’s not a match? Again, by a machine that already routinely accesses said records?
BTW, prior rulings already answered these questions. No harm and it’s a reasonable and constitutionally permitted search so long as the parameters given for the search are narrow.
What’s the potential for harm, in police officers searching every car in the city for drugs? The only people harmed will be those who actually do have drugs in the car.
It’s the exact same issue, here.
The database search will only produce matches that fit within the parameters required by the warrant, which is crafted based on the probable cause a judge deemed sufficient. If someone else in the database committed a different crime elsewhere, it would require a different warrant supported by different probable cause with different search parameters. There is no such limiting factor in the fishing expedition you suggest.
Any machine “search” that completely firewalls any non-matches from human knowledge is not a search violative of the 4th amendment, not by any reasonable interpretation of what the 4th guards against.
And, again, the 5th is the outlier here. No other court has ruled thusly, not where it withstood appeal. What I’m suggesting is (or was) a pretty orthodox constitutional interpretation.