this case is about cell phones and privacy around solve problems we all know the majority of us carry cell phones and can barely go minutes without turning them on creating a situation where anytime a crime is committed law enforcement can simply based upon the conclusion that we all have cell phones get a search warrant and collect anybody's location data rigid ating times that make the call who they call all that information scooped up without any particular after that it's that individual that committed a crime even possessed a cell phone that the consequences of this are a dramatic intrusion into the privacy and stress of all of us and in this case mr james so you're a crime happens near a place of worship a crime happens near a medical place a crime happens near a a location where an expression of st amendment rights are purring and law enforcement  of the phone numbers that of you ridge of the cell phone that was present in the location but it also included any numbers that that person may have texted or call and if it was a call the length of the call that occurred during the time frame for the time frame the data was collected from so it wasn't just seeking an individual phone number that then required additional and the other part of this is that cell phone numbers while originally may have bad and much more private much more difficult to get scriber details that information is much more commonly available on the internet through public searches now so by just saying it's only giving a cell phone number and not by great information that's not entirely true you can identify individuals and on top of that your den a  because i am worried about the slippery slope here but the limiting principle might well be that you had a series of crimes committed in different places at different times with a common modus operandi so while  there would not be probable cause or with what you suggested earlier write a single crime in a place of worship or at a meeting or something like back if you had six such crimes or five such crimes because they were five here all of the same facts that there's actually going to be evidence for cover that's relevant to what you're searching for right and so in this case the there is ample evidence in the search warrants that say presumably for fifteen plus minutes this isn't the st search morant and during that entire time they don't see him full out a search his cell phone to look at the time to do anything so i think the problem here judge is if they would have just had that the simple fact of yes we see this guy with a cell phone then it makes sense you're going to recover real data otherwise the judge i mean just to say well we were go string together a bunch of of of robberies we have no evidence throughout all of the robberies which is the case here of cell phone use but nevertheless we want to get all cell phone usage that doesn't cause i think with that case maybe for gas if we're talking about probabilities not quantifiable probability for probabilities when it comes to probable cause and can we then take why the chief justice roberts said and some of the cell phone cases that essentially you know an alien visiting from mars would with think that a cell phone is an appendage of that ninety percent of or more people have cell phones and therefore there's a likelihood that he had a cell phone and there's a likelihood that if he had a cell intended for the document box on the desk even though everybody had a document box on their tax that's that they kept their documents and that simply because of that back we should be able to go in and search people's houses and offices and look through the we just simply say because everybody does this so then what happens well most people have apartments or homes so does that justify searching an apartment or home for contraband because they're likely to be storing their contraband there i don't think this court would even come close to accepting that probability to justify a certain way and that in essence that's what's happening here in this case is th e the court signed up on warrants based upon no specific facts and and like i said evidence was just the opposite that he didn't have a cell phone  them a way to get past bad searches all the time but does not limit us and in this case where they were the only basis for the requirement for the request for probable cause i want to respond to some of the court's questions on the probable cause issue but i want to merely get the court to agree to to engage in a discussion on standing for a couple of reasons one is i think there's a very simple way to resolve this case because the defendant as we're able standing by saying he did not have the cell phone at the times of the robberies he said it wasn't in his possession and then nd that the miller smith line of cases should be enough in this case for the court to hold there's no reasonable expectation of privacy as to the probable cause the i want to make sure we're working from the right standard mister morrison talks in terms of probable cause but that's not the issue per se for this court the question for this court is whether the three separate state court judges had a substantial basis to believe there was a fair probability of finding evidence from this search warrant a search warrant was very narrowly tailored to get as judge gold this noted phone numbers at six particular locations from just a single cell tower and the the only twist in this case is the fact that we did not through those search warrants show that the defendant was using a cell phone during the and the government comes in and says well everyone has a cell phone so we're going to we're going to start looking at numbers what do you in a situation like that is a different case and if so what you know what do you think your position would be on it i hate to give you it's all on facts but they're the reason there's no slippery slope is probable cause is so fact intensive i think just because you can do it in this instance on one the st judge was based on three separate crimes that's that's not going to let people do it for a single crime every time but in some cases yes if you see a single defendant travel with that phone down a set of streets and you want to find where those four you know who went by those four towers absolutely that would make a great argument for a problem caused in that case it's not just the one instance there's no real rule no bright line you're drawing you're taking these facts and finding that these three judges separate judges in state court had a substantial base to determine in these facts based on these will see if the warrants look in this for this narrow information there was probable cause or a fair probability that evidence would be found  i just think that worry as you yourself indicated you came to the conclusion that maybe it's not there there's not a slippery slope issue in these types of cases in my view not on this type of resolution of it as i suggested i think the court should resolve it on the standing issue i recognize the district court did not resolve it in that way i say this for two reasons the st that i suggested it is it is extremely easy to do it based on the waiver the defendant never put in any of his documents that the cell phone was his we put in evidence in the search warrant affidavits that the cell phone was registered to him so there was an there was a basis for the district court to find standing in terms of early find that it was a cell phone there wasn't a basis for reasonable expectation of privacy is ok too but at trial the defendant after the evidence was introduced took the stand it made the cell phone was his but he used an alibi defense to say this bare person whose name he only knows his kid is nickname borrowed my car which didn't have a stereo so when he borrowed my car on these few times he also borrowed my cell phone it must have been him that robbed those those stores you don't have standing based on your cell phone you have standing based on your cell phone d in the extension of yourself and giving your own location he said that's not what happened in this case he didn't have standing in the actual cell phone for which the data was being a kind of i was out of work you know i understand the drugs and the government can't then use that statement at trial against the defendant there in the set system is set up just so you can say those are my trucks if you're saying they're not that's a lack of standing they letter there's plenty of cases on exactly that situation the way i would hope the court would resolve that is a way that would be useful to people in practice the situation we have here is pretty common  i think it's also fairly easy to decide this case on the basis of miller and smith and distinct from the carpenter rare situation that the supreme court carved out i think standing is a lot like probable cause there are facts specific you don't need to you know finding a lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy in these circumstances doesn't mean there never will but the supreme court made clear in carpenter that it was dealing with a rare circumstance it was dealing with a different circumstance in that there there was an individual being his information a particular person's information was being obtained for in the shortest instance seven days the court in a footnote narrowed it's holding to a search warrant of two hundred and forty seven historical cell site information information for a week and we don't we have a we have sets of hours on six different days that don't tell you anything about what the defend doing unless the defendant is robbing those stores in which case you don't have the you know that that's not a privacy entry issue we want to protect also well we deal with c s ally this the cells cell site location information in this case it's a tower gump which again carpenter said it was not addressing as as we've noted before it's a string of numbers we get and it's telephone numbers and you get some information about how powerful the signal was who was contacted who wasn't but it's not the sort of information that infringes much on anyone's expectation of privacy the expectation of privacy in carpenter that was carving out that rare exception was we knew every where you went for a full week and that is what it took for carpenter to say rd party doctrine has its limits of course it has its limits i think every day ending issue the expectation of privacy issue is somewhat sui generis and you've got to analyze where we're at and time what the expectations are  in this case the defendant didn't have a subjective expectation of privacy in those particular dates he didn't have the phone according to him and his lawyer relied on that in his closing argument and the lawyers have not since repudiated that state and come back and told this court that no the defendant did not have that cell phone on that date more to the point and what would be useful for us is that there's not an objective expectation of privacy in this narrow sort of information because this is the sort of thing in terms of being useful this is a very narrowly tailored very effective tool for law enforcement and we can get search warrants we can get probable cause but there's no need to do that if the court would take the tiny extension if that miller and smith and extend the party the rd party doctrine to the facts of this case those are the points i wanted to make i hope i've addressed your questions if you have  district court didn't reach it i it's not like i preserve the issue or an argument i'm just because i'm there pelley i'm just suggesting a basis for the court to resolve this in an extraordinarily easy way and in a way  that's just the defendant shouldn't be able to tell the jury under oath that it's not his cell phone at the time of these incidents and then come here and expect you to waste your time on this argument i wish we'd thought of it in the in our cell phone into question because he decided to get on the stand and testify as he did i don't think that's a race that's standing or change the record that the court considered in making that decision about the suppression issue the this court just as the district court should be limited and reviewing these search warrants on the record that the district court had and making the decision to t that and now i want to i want to go back to the government's addressing of your slippery slope argument judge i think what was telling the government is answering that your question is they articulated the presence of facts that drive this slippery slope and specifically talked about specific facts that tight cellphones to the crime that they were asking for the search warrant on and i do think that that's that's right i i as i've been are there needs to be more facts than just this assumption we all have cell phones so therefore we should be able to get these records and so the judge stressed that answer your question more directly i don't think it matters if there's one robbery or one hundred robberies that match up if there is not a piece of evidence that  a cell phone was present then there should be probable cause to go on a fishing expedition to find out if there was i think that a search warrant requires it against some guy too but then you're searching for and not just an assumption about general human behavior to justify warrants legality that can't eat the can you think of just just for example a for example what would you suggest would be the kind of additional information there that winds supply with cheap what you would say is missing here i think of one even that the limbs of an object that appears to be a cell phone certainly would get would you know provide the required fact i think collateral information a suggesting somebody might be involved from a confidential informant somebody was involved in these robberies and they know they have a cell phone or they communicate with that person with a cell phone even those very remote facts at least provide a quantum reliance that the yes the carpenter case certainly is narrow and certainly didn't explicit and explicitly said it's not addressing our dogs but the government has appointed in any case that has a dress and i think importantly the carpenters case and the cases that are coming out about cell phones the courts are recognizing a greater and greater protections of privacy interests and cell phones and instead of what the government is  is that we go the other way and just a lot of these intrusions because they're minimal i'm people's privacy interests that's close recognizing that in reality the th amendment should be providing greater protections for people's u