Minnesota bill would ban warrants allowing police to collect data from devices near a crime scene

A bipartisan group of Minnesota lawmakers has proposed a bill seeking to ban warrants allowing law enforcement to gather data revealing which cellphones and other devices that were near a crime scene at a specific time.

Democrat state Sen. Erin Maye Quade introduced a Senate bill to ban those warrants in most cases, with Sens. Omar Fateh, also a Democrat, and Eric Lucero, a Republican, joining as original sponsors.

The bill would also allow anyone whose information was obtained during the search to sue law enforcement.

Lawmakers argue the warrants should be prohibited except in emergency situations. They said reverse location warrants, sometimes called “geofence” or “dragnet” warrants, are too broad and violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

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Critics of the warrants say authorities can gather data on thousands of people near a particular area, including those who attended an event that could be of interest to law enforcement, such as a protest.

“We do believe that we have to balance our constitutional rights and public safety so that we’re not essentially sending law enforcement in to search for a needle in a haystack by exponentially increasing the size of the haystack,” Maye Quade said during a hearing on March 9.

Law enforcement groups, including the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, contend that the bill is too broad, although both have suggested a willingness to negotiate with lawmakers about data privacy concerns.

“We recognize and share the Legislature’s commitment to protecting individual privacy and civil liberties. However, as drafted, this bill would impose an outright prohibition on investigative tools that are lawful, court-supervised, and, in many cases, critical to solving serious crimes and protecting public safety,” the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association said in a letter to lawmakers.

Senate lawmakers first discussed the bill in the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee on March 9. House lawmakers discussed a companion bill, originally proposed by Rep. Sandra Feist, a Democrat, in the Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee on Feb. 24.

This comes amid an ongoing case at the national level, in which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in April on the constitutionality of reverse location warrants.

Between 2018 and 2020, the number of reverse location warrants in Minnesota jumped from 22 to 173.

In 2023, Google said it would stop storing location data in a way that would make it susceptible to reverse location warrant requests. By July of last year, the company said all location history data previously stored on its servers had been wiped or moved to on-device storage.

But groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have raised concerns about whether that change is enough.

The warrants appear to still be used in Minnesota, as law enforcement groups argue they play a key role in solving investigations.

Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said a ban on those warrants “would have a major detrimental effect on public safety in Minnesota.”

“There are numerous examples of case investigations where reverse location data has saved lives, even just recently,” Evans said in a letter to lawmakers, although he added that he supports “reasonable safeguards for data privacy protections” and would be “more than willing to collaborate on possible solutions to implement more safeguards while still preserving such an important technological tool.”

As written, the Senate bill would prohibit warrants to collect information on devices that searched for a specific keyword, phrase or website. It would also ban similar collection of GPS coordinates, cell tower and Wi-Fi connectivity data.

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Lucero said during the March 9 hearing that the bill should not be viewed as anti-law enforcement, arguing it promotes pro-constitutional principles.

“We simply want to make sure that those time-tested principles are protected in the new digital realm,” Lucero said.

Lucero referenced the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures unless a warrant specifies a particular place and the person or thing to be seized.

“Reverse search warrants are the antithesis of that,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.