Bulk location queries
Reverse warrants
This page is public-interest research. An argument grade is not a court finding. A watchdog page describes the device. It is not proof a Nevada agency bought it or turned a feature on. A product description is not a Nevada practice. Agencies are not merged: the City of Las Vegas Department of Public Safety, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the Clark County School District, the City of Reno, and the Nevada Department of Public Safety stay separate. A hotlist hit is not a confirmed crime. Legal review of this page is unverified.
What it does
A bulk location query asks for location on many devices at once, rather than one phone named in advance. A geofence is one form. A broker area search is another. The result is a crowd, which investigators then try to shrink to a suspect.
Privacy watchdog concerns
- Electronic Frontier Foundation. Real-Time Location Tracking. EFF says police use purchased location data either to follow one device or to list every device inside a drawn area. EFF describes that area search as the equivalent of a geofence warrant. This is EFF’s description. It is not proof a Nevada agency ran such a query.
- Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fog Data Science Puts our Fourth Amendment Rights up for Sale. EFF says Fog sells phone-location data to police and that an area search is the equivalent of a geofence. EFF says a warrant should be required to look up one device and that dragnet area searches raise a Fourth Amendment problem. EFF says location data cannot be anonymized. This is EFF’s argument. Carpenter is not a holding about Fog.
Constitutional issues
Analogical constitutional argument
Fourth Amendment, Nevada Constitution art. 1, § 18
Warrant practice not established for a Nevada agency
Bulk location queries: No Nevada bulk query is in this build. Carpenter does not decide it. The Fog contract does not, by itself, show that Nevada DPS ran area searches. The query logs are not here.
- Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). Analogical constitutional argument. United States Supreme Court. Carpenter addressed one person’s historical cell-site location information. A bulk query is a different request. The analogy is not the holding.
Statutes attached to read, not findings.
- NRS Chapter 239. Nevada public-records law is the route to ask for contracts, policies, and logs. Citing it is not a finding that a surveillance practice is unlawful.
- Nevada Constitution art. 1, § 18. State search-and-seizure provision. This page does not quote the section. No section anchor was verified. It is listed only where a search question is actually implicated.
- 42 U.S.C. § 1983. A civil remedy for a deprivation of federal rights under color of state law. It is not a warrant statute, and it does not itself make a surveillance practice unlawful.
Nevada use
Not documented on this page.
Capability only. Not a restatement of the Fog contract.
See also: Geofence warrants (Google reverse location); Fog Data Science
Next record
Bulk location queries: Keep this separate from the Fog dollar figure. The figure is not a bulk-query count.
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