In re Application of the United States for Historical Cell Site Data
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2013
- Citation
- 724 F.3d 600 (5th Cir. 2013)
- Standard applied
- SCA § 2703(d) — facial constitutionality of compelled disclosure orders
What the court held
Court orders authorised by the Stored Communications Act compelling cell-phone service providers to produce subscribers' historical cell-site information are not per se unconstitutional. The Fifth Circuit reversed a magistrate judge who had granted the subscriber-information requests but denied sixty days of historical cell-site data on the view that compelled warrantless disclosure of such data always violates the Fourth Amendment.
Why
The court framed the question as a facial challenge to the statutory mechanism rather than a case-specific assessment of a particular collection, and held that the mechanism can be constitutionally applied even if some applications might not be. It noted that the magistrate judge had taken judicial notice of a body of technical material about cell-phone networks drawn from congressional testimony, studies and provider privacy policies to reach the contrary conclusion.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
This decision matters less for its outcome, which Carpenter overtook, than for the posture: it was decided on the government's ex parte applications, before any defendant existed to argue the point. That is how much of surveillance law is made, and it is why the technical record a magistrate judge assembles at the application stage can be decisive. For practitioners it is also a reminder that a facial holding leaves as-applied challenges open.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: CSLI · ex parte application · Stored Communications Act
Cited 155times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on fourth amendment and privacy & surveillance
- United States v. JonesSupreme Court of the United States · 2012Attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Th…
- Riley v. CaliforniaSupreme Court of the United States · 2014Police generally may not search the digital contents of a cell phone seized incident to an arrest without a warrant. The search-incident-to-arrest exception, wh…
- Carpenter v. United StatesSupreme Court of the United States · 2018The government's acquisition of historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a Fourth Amendment search, and generally requires a warrant…
- United States v. WarshakCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit · 2010A subscriber has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of e-mails stored with, or sent or received through, a commercial internet service provider…
- United States v. GrahamCourt of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit · 2016Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit held that a cell-phone user has no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site location information held by hi…
- United States v. DavisCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit · 2015Sitting en banc, the Eleventh Circuit held that a court order under § 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act compelling a telephone company to produce its bus…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.