Carpenter refresher for digital warrants

Are we giving sufficient weight to Carpenter’s recognition of a reasonable expectation of privacy in historical CSLI when training new magistrates on geofence requests and tower dumps? In a 2025 clerkship seminar in Richmond, I saw warrant templates still treating seven days of CSLI as mere business records — I’d welcome the curricula or hypotheticals you use to bring practice back to Fourth Amendment first principles.

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We rewrote our templates so geofences and tower dumps presume CSLI is ‘deeply revealing’ under Carpenter: default ≤6‑hour windows tied to the scene, a required alternatives box, explicit minimization/retention, and a two‑step filter by non‑case agents. Fourth Circuit wrinkles (e.g., Chatrie) may nudge the particulars, but teaching magistrates to treat CSLI like a diary, not a receipt, has stuck — would a short hypo contrasting a 30‑minute geofence with a 7‑day pull help your seminar?

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I use a “7 days vs 6 hours” CSLI map exercise — add a minimization/deletion clause.

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