Opinion ID: 8704094
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Governing Standard

Text: The Fourth Amendment guarantees that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.” U.S. Const, amend. IV. The Supreme Court has determined that “a Fourth Amendment search occurs when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.” Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 33, 121 S.Ct. 2038, 150 L.Ed.2d 94 (2001) (citing Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring)). More recently, the Supreme Court in this case has held that “the Government’s installation of a GPS device on [Jones’] vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search.’ ” Jones, 132 S.Ct. at 949. The majority’s holding was premised on the fact that the government had physically intruded onto defendant’s private property for the purpose of obtaining information. See id. at 949-54. 7 The Supreme Court made clear that “[situations involving merely the transmission of electronic signals without trespass would remain subject to Katz analysis.” Id. at 953; accord id. at 955 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Here, there was no comparable trespass on Jones’ physical property; instead, there was the mere “transmission of electronic signals.” 8 Thus, the traditional reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test applies. The constitutionality of allowing law enforcement to obtain cell-site data absent a warrant supported by probable cause has been vigorously debated in recent jurisprudence. With respect to historical cell-site data, numerous courts have addressed this question, and a majority have concluded that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in such data. 9 Most of these cases have relied on the “third-party doctrine,” established in United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435, 96 S.Ct. 1619, 48 L.Ed.2d 71 (1976), and Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 99 S.Ct. 2577, 61 L.Ed.2d 220 (1979), which provides that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties,” Smith, 442 U.S. at 743-44, 99 S.Ct. 2577; see also Miller, 425 U.S. at 442-44, 96 S.Ct. 1619. In Miller, the Supreme Court found that a bank customer had no reasonable expectation of privacy in financial information that he voluntarily conveyed to the bank for it to use in the ordinary course of business. 425 U.S. at 442, 96 S.Ct. 1619. And in Smith, the Court similarly held that the defendant did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers he had dialed from his telephone, because he voluntarily conveyed that information to his cellular telephone company when he placed the calls. 442 U.S. at 742-45, 99 S.Ct. 2577. Applying the third-party doctrine, most federal judges — including two from this Court — have concluded that defendants have no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site data because (a) they voluntarily conveyed their location information to the cell phone company when they initiated a call and transmitted their signal to a nearby cell tower, and (b) the companies maintained that information in the ordinary course of business. See, e.g., Graham, 846 F.Supp.2d at 397-401; Madi son, 2012 WL 3095357, at -9; Urbina Opinion, No. 09-153-02, at 2-3; Lamberth Opinion, No. 11-449, at 9-11; Benford, 2010 WL 1266507, at -3; Suarez-Blanca, 2008 WL 4200156, at -9; but see, e.g., Smith II Opinion, 747 F.Supp.2d at 843-45 (rejecting third-party doctrine because most individuals do not know that use of their cell phone creates a record of their location and therefore do not “voluntarily” convey that information to the third-party cell phone company). 10 Other courts, at least prior to Jones, have analyzed cell-site location information under the Supreme Court’s “tracking devices” eases. In United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 103 S.Ct. 1081, 75 L.Ed.2d 55 (1983), the Supreme Court held that the use of a tracking device to follow movements on public highways did not implicate Fourth Amendment concerns, because the defendants had no reasonable expectation of privacy while in plain view on public thoroughfares. Id. at 282-84, 103 S.Ct. 1081. In United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705, 104 S.Ct. 3296, 82 L.Ed.2d 530 (1984), by contrast, the Court held that the use of a tracking device to determine the specific location of the tracked material within a private residence was a Fourth Amendment search because that fact “could not have been visually verified.” Id. at 715, 104 S.Ct. 3296. Because cell-site data is typically not precise enough to identify the particular building from which a suspect placed a phone call, several courts, relying on the Knotts/Karo distinction, have found that such information does not constitute a Fourth Amendment search. See, e.g., In re Application of the United States of America for an Order Directing a Provider of Electronic Communication Service to Disclose Records to the Government, 620 F.3d 304, 312-13 (3d Cir.2010); Suarez-Blanca, 2008 WL 4200156, at -11; Kaplan Opinion, 460 F.Supp.2d at 462 (noting that if such information could track an individual into a private home then it might raise Fourth Amendment concerns). Among the courts that have come to the opposite conclusion that the use of cell-site data obtained without a warrant based on probable cause constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, many have relied on the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Maynard. There, this Circuit applied the “mosaic theory,” under which law enforcement activities which, standing alone, do not violate the Fourth Amendment, may nevertheless do so when viewed in the aggregate. Id. at 562-64. Thus, even though the government could have physically followed Jones’s car in public spaces without violating the Fourth Amendment, the government’s use of a GPS tracking device to record his movements over a month-long period violated his reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of his movements. Id. at 563. 11 This approach also appears to enjoy support among the concurring justices in Jones. For instance, Justice Alito — in a concurrence joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan — noted that although “relatively short-term monitoring of a person’s movements on public streets accords with expectations of privacy that our society has recognized as reasonable ... the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy.” Jones, 132 S.Ct. at 964 (Alito, J., concurring) (internal citation omitted). Similarly, Justice Sotomayor pondered whether there is a “reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements.” Id. at 956 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). However, as correctly argued by the government (see Opp’n at 16-17), the rationale adopted in Maynard was not endorsed by the majority opinion in Jones. 12 In response to Justice Alito’s suggestion of a distinction between short-term tracking and longer-term monitoring, Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, dismissed it as “a novelty” whose basis “remains unexplained.” Id. at 954. 13 {See also supra note 8.) As this discussion reveals, there is a robust debate over the question of whether the Fourth Amendment applies to cell-site data obtained from a cellular provider, but to date, this Court knows of no federal court that has held that the use of prospective cell-site records constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, or of any federal court that has suppressed any type of cell-site data obtained pursuant to a court order under the SCA. 14 While this issue may someday receive the attention of the Supreme Court, 15 this Court need not decide whether the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it obtained the cell data from Cingular Wireless, since the well-recognized good-faith exception bars the application of the exclusionary-rule to this case. See Ferguson, 508 F.Supp.2d at 9-10 (declining to consider the constitutionality of the SCA because the government’s reliance on it was objectively reasonable); Hardrick, 2012 WL 4883666, at  (“the good-faith exception applies and is dispositive”; “[b]y declining to reach this Fourth Amendment issue the Court is applying the ‘sound judicial practice of refusing to decide or address issues whose resolution is not necessary to dispose of a case, unless there are compelling reasons to do otherwise’ ”); Graham, 846 F.Supp.2d at 405-06. Therefore, the Court will decline defendant’s invitation (see Reply at 5) to decide whether a constitutional violation occurred in 2005 in this case. See United States v. Webb, 255 F.3d 890, 904 (D.C.Cir.2001) (holding that good-faith exception applied and suppression was not appropriate despite the fact that “the question remain[ed]” whether the warrant was supported by probable cause).