Minnesota lawmakers weigh a ban on reverse location warrants used in criminal cases
Minnesota lawmakers are weighing whether to limit or ban reverse location warrants that can be used to identify devices present near a crime scene, a dispute that is playing out alongside an ongoing U.S. Supreme Court case on the warrants’ constitutionality.
In Minnesota, the warrants involve a judge’s order allowing law enforcement to request data showing which cellphones or other devices were present in a defined area at a defined time. Supporters of a proposed ban say the approach can capture information on far more people than investigators need, including thousands who were at an event of interest such as a protest or a funeral, and could therefore violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, said in testimony during a March 9 hearing that lawmakers need to balance constitutional rights with public safety, while not “essentially sending law enforcement in to search for a needle in a haystack by exponentially increasing the size of the haystack.” Maye Quade proposed a Senate bill to bar most reverse location warrants, alongside Sen. Eric Lucero, R-Dayton, and Sen. Omar Fateh, DFL-Minneapolis as original sponsors.
Lucero argued during the same hearing that the bill should not be framed as anti-law-enforcement, saying instead that it is “pro constitutional principles.” He pointed to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that warrants specify the place and person or thing to be seized, and he said that “reverse search warrants are the antithesis of that.”
Law enforcement groups and state agencies have urged lawmakers to narrow the bill rather than impose an outright prohibition. The Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association and the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension argued the draft, as written, is too broad. They said it would bar the warrants except in cases of a “sudden emergency,” and the draft would also allow people whose information was obtained to sue law enforcement.
BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, in a March 5 letter to lawmakers, said a ban “would have a major detrimental effect on public safety in Minnesota,” adding that there are “numerous examples” of cases in which reverse location data “has saved lives, even just recently.” Evans also said he supports “reasonable safeguards for data privacy protections” and told lawmakers he would be “more than willing to collaborate on possible solutions” that preserve what he described as an important investigative tool while adding privacy protections.
Minnesota’s police association president also emphasized the role of digital evidence in investigations. Jay Henthorne told lawmakers that “digital evidence is often all that’s available in modern criminal investigations” and that reverse location warrants help when investigators do not know who committed a crime. Henthorne said the warrants can “generate leads in otherwise unsolvable cases” and that “removing this tool will make it significantly harder to identify suspects in serious crimes,” adding that the warrants require probable cause and a judge’s signature and that data provided by the warrant is used to begin an investigation that investigators then corroborate with additional evidence and often other warrants.
A separate issue raised during legislative discussion is how location data is handled by technology companies. The bill’s supporters pointed to data indicating the use of reverse location warrants increased in Minnesota from 22 between 2018 and 2020 to 173, described as a 686% increase, with Maye Quade citing that trend in her testimony. Supporters also noted that Google in 2023 said it would stop storing location data in a way that could be susceptible to these requests and that by July 2025 it said previously stored location history data on its servers had been deleted or moved to device storage only, though privacy advocates have said the change may not be enough.
Senate lawmakers first discussed the bill in the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee on March 9, while House lawmakers considered a companion measure originally proposed by Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, in the Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee on Feb. 24. The question of whether reverse location warrants violate constitutional protections is also being weighed nationally, with the Supreme Court expected to hear oral arguments in April.