Investigators aimed to narrow in on a suspect by seeking two search warrants for a series of “tower dumps”-voluminous records maintained by cellular network providers which contain the historical cell site location information (“CSLI”) for all cell phone users in the vicinity of the crimes during the relevant time periods. Law enforcement believed that the same individual was ultimately responsible. In 2018, law enforcement officials investigated a string of armed robberies, one of which resulted in a homicide. While reaffirming that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their location data, the Court also held that broad searches sweeping thousands of innocent individuals onto the government’s radar are not necessarily so general as to be unconstitutional. In an effort to identify an individual suspect, the government sought the data of tens of thousands of cell phone users. In the Spring of 2022, the SJC decided a novel issue involving cell phone location information in Commonwealth v. Maintaining constitutional protections against unreasonable government searches and seizures has proved challenging where personal devices like cell phones-which contain a quality and quantity of digital surveillance and personal data beyond what the framers could have ever imagined-are on our person, recording our locations, at virtually all times. As modern technology continues to advance, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has struggled to keep up. Over the past decade, the Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) has grappled with the evolving contours of constitutional privacy rights in our digital age.
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