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and/or types of applications that officers have reason to believe the suspect used in
furtherance of the crimes under investigation. See United States v. Winn, 79 F. Supp. 3d
904, 919 (S.D. Ill. 2015) (“The major, overriding problem with the description of the object
of the search – ‘any or all files’ – is that the police did not have probable cause to believe
that everything on the phone was evidence of the crime of public indecency.”).
In some cases, it may be sufficient to limit the officers to search for specific items
on the phone. For example, if there is probable cause to believe that a suspect used a
friend’s phone to record a sex crime, the issuing judge reasonably could limit the search of
that phone to the recording itself (in the absence of the affiant explaining why there was
probable cause to believe that evidence of the crime would be contained in other items on
the phone). That would presumably authorize a narrow search of any application on the
phone that could have made or stored the recording.
Perhaps the most common limitation that issuing judges should consider including
in a warrant to satisfy the particularity requirement is a temporal restriction. In this regard,
Commonwealth v. Snow, 160 N.E.3d 277 (Mass. 2021), is instructive. In Snow, following
a shooting, the police obtained a search warrant to search the defendant’s cell phone for
the following information:
Cellular telephone number; electronic serial number, international mobile
equipment identity, mobile equipment identifier or other similar
identification number; address book; contact list; personal calendar, date
book entries, and to-do lists; saved, opened, unopened, draft, sent, and
deleted electronic mail; incoming, outgoing, draft, and deleted text messages
and video messages; history of calls sent, received, and missed; any
voicemail messages, including those that are opened, unopened, saved, or
deleted; GPS information; mobile instant message chat logs, data and contact