“Reverse Location” Search Warrants Identify All Cellphones Near a Crime Scene
19th February 2019
Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a “reverse location” search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.
The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they’re authorizing.
We have the technology. Whether we will be allowed to use it has yet to be determined.