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> U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”

It continues to amaze me that police are the only group who can use the defense of ignorance of the law.

Terr_ · 1h ago

Not only that, when they lie in conversations/interrogations, they can lie about what the law is, as well as what official acts can/will undertake.

To me there is a fundamental difference between lies like:

1. "Your buddy in the next room already ratted you out."

2. "Sign this admission and you'll only get 6 months, tops. If you don't, we can seize your house and your mother will be living on the streets. "

some-guy · 9m ago

When I was a child, I thought police had to go to law school. How else would you enforce the law if you didn't know what the law was?

LinuxBender · 43m ago

Never talk to the police. Let your lawyers do the talking.

plsbenice34 · 52m ago

I dont see the difference, both should be illegal

nemomarx · 59m ago

I get your point but actually why can they lie and claim your buddy ratted you out?

p_ing · 57m ago

Tax payers don't care enough to force the congress critters to change the laws in <your home state>.

Instead, you get human beings who are shielded by a thin piece of paper who can summarily execute you, then say "whoops, my bad".

Police are nothing more than State-sponsored gang members.

pstuart · 37m ago

Many of those tax payers are fine with them being gang members, but only against "others" -- that's a feature, not a bug.

mjd · 1h ago

The rule that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible exists to disincentivize the police from obtaining evidence illegally.

But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting evidence doesn't serve that purpose.

Update: This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception has been in U.S. law for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out of thin air.

ty6853 · 1h ago

If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted.

mjd · 1h ago

This is not responsive. The police did not commit a crime here.

Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.

ceejayoz · 1h ago

> The police did not commit a crime here.

They did, however, violate the Fourth Amendment. Per the court.

mjd · 32m ago

The Fourth Amendment was violated by the magistrate judge who issued the illegal warrant, not by the police officers who, acting in in good faith, executed it.

RHSeeger · 9m ago

No, the judge told them they were allowed to do it. The act of doing it is what violated the fourth amendment. If they hadn't acted on the warrant, the fourth amendment wouldn't have been violated. The judge was _wrong_, but the police are the ones that violated the amendment.

mjd · 5m ago

“No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, … and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Judge Magit violated the amendment by issuing the warrant.

addicted · 8m ago

If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise and in some cases also be acquitted.

So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur.

A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.

dragonwriter · 37s ago

> If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise

Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).

JumpCrisscross · 1h ago

> If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted

How often does this actually happen in criminal matters?

RHSeeger · 4m ago

Hide some drugs in someone's luggage when they're traveling at an airport and then get back to me. There's tons of cases of people being arrested for things they either had no idea they doing or had no idea was illegal. And then even more where the police tack on lots of charges for someone that's already been arrested; for things that they had no idea they were a problem in the first place.

ty6853 · 57m ago

Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this would actually still touch federal law / interstate commerce.

Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.

JumpCrisscross · 52m ago

The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason.

CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability.

Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.

ty6853 · 22m ago

These kind of convictions aren't rare in the firearms domain. People get arrested or convicted all the time for doing stuff they had no idea was illegal. Randy Weaver (Ruby Ridge) is one of the most famous examples (cut a shotgun ~1" too short because the informant changed the gun at last minute). More recently a Navy Sailor (Patrick Adamiak) in the pipeline to be a SEAL was convicted after selling an imported parts kit that had been destroyed per ATF guidelines from the early 2000s. But apparently when he resold it, (after buying it openly from gunbroker), the ATF decided the way the kit was cut up was wrong and put him away for 20 years. Oh yes they had a few other excuses -- he had a decomissioned RPG tube, so the ATF just put an entirely other gun inside the fucking tube and fired it to claim it still work.

In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him.

mjd · 1h ago

It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail fraud, for example.

Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?

__loam · 1h ago

This is a weird concept to people in stem fields, but in law intent matters a lot. It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.

ty6853 · 27m ago

It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it is a strict liability crime.

Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it.

Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.

aftbit · 1m ago

Are you talking about the AutoKeyCard case, Kristopher Ervin and Matthew Hoover? Ervin finally gets out of prison on 2025-05-03 and Hoover gets out on Christmas 2026.

kevin_thibedeau · 3m ago

Meanwhile, you can use bump-stocks as a redneck machine gun all day long.

encom · 1h ago

If you can cite previous court cases in your favour, you probably won't.

plsbenice34 · 57m ago

Excluding the evidence would incentivize police to stop choosing the most convenient interpretation of the law. They should have to try to make the most accurate interpretation, which means punishment when they are wrong. Just like for everyone else

mjd · 38m ago

No. In 2020 the police went to a magistrate judge to ask for a warrant. The judge issued the warrant. Five years later, another judge has determined that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place.

That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.

RHSeeger · 11m ago

> That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.

It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather.

Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.

Vegenoid · 20m ago

The evidence can be suppressed without punishing the police.

reverendsteveii · 55m ago

Horseshit. This isn't a criminal conviction, the standard of mens rea doesn't and shouldn't apply. To add a good faith loophole only incentivizes two things: purposeful ignorance and lying.

mjd · 45m ago

Learn to tell the difference between "I don't like it" and "horseshit".

The legal precedent for this goes back decades, and it's been argued by many people better-informed than you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception

wutwutwat · 1h ago

Who does the court work for? The government. Who do the police work for? The government.

Yeah yeah, they work for “the people” “the tax payer” whatever. They work for the government. They get their paychecks from the same place.

What are you expecting here? This isn’t equal.

ceejayoz · 1h ago

There's a very good chance the cops in question do not work for the Federal government. They certainly don't work for the judicial branch. It isn't a perfect setup, but it's better than many.

ty6853 · 1h ago

The whole thing is intertwined. Podunk cops often get put on 3 letter task forces and work in a mutual arrangement with each other. They often have a really clever scam going on where they kick seizures up to federal agencies, since it is so much harder to block/contest federal forfeitures than local ones, and then the federal agencies kick back a fraction of it.

Maybe their paychecks don't come from the federal government nominally but in practice it's highly intermixed.

wutwutwat · 1h ago

They all get paid from my pay check. They work for the government. Level doesn’t matter. They protect their own.

JumpCrisscross · 57m ago

> Level doesn’t matter

This level of civic and legal ignorance is a large part of why our country is in the mess that it is.

ty6853 · 1h ago

It's ironic that Milton Friedman, the guy that invented income tax withholding, was one of the staunchest fighters against it in the end.

They all get their paycheck straight out your paycheck before you even think about it. It's absolutely brilliant. No one would actually pay for most the horse-shit we get in return if you had to sign the check.

mjd · 1h ago

It took me a while to track down the actual opinion.

The case, United States v Spurlock, is 3:23-cr-00022 in the Nevada federal district. The opinion itself is ECF document #370, and I have hosted a copy at https://plover.com/~mjd/misc/cell-tower-dump-opinion.pdf in case other people are interested.

Jimmc414 · 18m ago

Interesting that the recent ruling against blanket cell tower data searches wouldn't have affected the Mark Gooch case. In that insatnce, investigators used targeted cell phone data (ie "geofencing") to track his movements, not a mass data collection. Under the new standards, this type of focused surveillance would still be permitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBBTfy29WKI

They absolutely wouldn't have caught him without the cell phone data, highlighting in my mind, the fine line between privacy and safety, which is something I personally struggle to articulate clearly. While it's reassuring this ruling wouldn't affect this case, I can easily see how "tower dumps" could be misused. It's confusing, though, that the judge ruled this unconstitutional action permissible "just this once." Either it's unconstitutional or it's not. Judges shouldn't have the authority grant one-time exceptions.

flipnotyk · 1h ago

"It's unconstitutional and illegal, but you're not being held accountable and you can still use the data." Yeah that tracks.

mjd · 41m ago

It is not reasonable to hold someone accountable for doing something illegal in 2020 that was only determined to be illegal in 2025.

The police officers applied to a judge for a warrant. The judge gave them the warrant. Now another judge says that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place. How is that the police's fault? How would you hold them accountable?

pcaharrier · 7m ago

This is the basic idea of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule was supposed to deter police misconduct (e.g., searching a house without a warrant, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment) by preventing them from using evidence they never should have had. But the deterrence rationale doesn't hold up that well when the police reasonably (and that's key) believed that they were acting lawfully.

thatguymike · 57m ago

If this holds, can cops still ask for whether a specific phone number was present on a cell tower at a certain time? I can't tell if it's the breadth of the data collection that's unconsitutional because it catches lots of innocent people's data; or if it's the concept of using cell towers altogether.

mjd · 10m ago

It's the breadth. Searches have to be narrowly tailored to provide evidence of the specific crime being investigated. There's discussion of this on pages 12–13 of the judge's opinion.

https://plover.com/~mjd/misc/cell-tower-dump-opinion.pdf

reverendsteveii · 1h ago

How many times recently have we seen rulings from judges that establish that something is definitely illegal but the person who did is still allowed to do it or at least there's no mechanism by which they can be punished for doing it? Having laws and then picking and choosing when they'll be enforced and against whom is the same as not having laws in the first place. And before you cite the good faith exception, passing a law that says "It's legal to pick and choose when the law applies" doesn't legitimize it.

dylan604 · 1h ago

“That said, because the Court appears to be the first court within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception otherwise applies, the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.”

At least the weasel words allow/recognize that the decision is made on a branch of unknown strength. The branch may snap if other judges overrule, or it may be found to be a main branch if other judges uphold the decision. I'm not a legal scholar, but that's the first I've heard of this type of acknowledgement. However, seems like the courage ran out at that point instead of denying the evidence to be used, and letting it go to appeal to test the thickness of that branch.

transpute · 1h ago

EFF tool to counter BYOT (Bring Your Own Tower), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43283917

excalibur · 22m ago

Did they blow the cell phone snooping machine up when they were done like in The Dark Knight?

thrance · 24m ago

Who cares at this point what the judicial branch rules or thinks? ICE received the benediction of our new king to use any means necessary to do its bidding, legal or extralegal. They are now arresting citizens [1] and putting them on planes straight to those El Salvador death camps, Law be damned. If tomorrow they can use Cell Tower Data to more efficiently round up political opponents, be assured they will.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5255815-american-ci...

Improvement · 38m ago

Paywall free link: https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...

IncreasePosts · 56m ago

So the warrant is forbidden - could the police just ask nicely for the data and have telcos provide it?

Analemma_ · 1h ago

Do law schools even bother teaching about "fruit of the poisoned tree" anymore? It's clearly a dead letter; this is yet another ruling that if you gather evidence illegally you'll get a finger-wag but allowed to proceed as usual. Why even have a notion of legality of evidence if it doesn't matter?

mjd · 1h ago

The purpose of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine is to disincentivize illegal collection of evidence. But there has always been a good-faith exception to it: if the police genuinely believed that what they were doing was legal, as they did in this case, relying on established legal precedent, then throwing out the evidence doesn't disincentivize anything.

But the declaration that cell tower dumps are illegal now disincentivizes future police from relying on dumps, since they now know (or should know) that such evidence will be thrown out. And more to the point, magistrate judges will stop issuing warrants for cell tower dumps.

topspin · 1h ago

"fruit of the poisonous tree" is one of those "magic words" that a lot of people think will preclude prosecution. Judges frequently make exceptions and judgement calls on whether a given search was legal, and people are frequently convicted on "poisoned" evidence, and evidence compromised in all sorts of other ways.

reverendsteveii · 50m ago

>since they now know (or should know)

but can you hold them to that in any manner or does each officer need to be told officially and continue to plead ignorance of the law until they are in some documented way informed of it? can you plead ignorance of the law if you know it's not legal to dump all traffic from a cell phone tower but no one said that it's not legal to dump all the traffic from a web server (assuming for the sake of argument the obv interpretation that this ruling applies to all data stores that contain data from multiple people)? Every time you need to violate the constitution can you just have the new guy do it? Does declaring this illegal actually do anything to protect the rights of people who did nothing wrong and had their data seized and pored over by police anyway?

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Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

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