A county judge gave attorneys 45 days to submit briefs to support their arguments about the use of 25 photos of child pornography as evidence against a Harmony man.

In an evidence suppression hearing held Tuesday, May 21, in the case against Daniel A. Kelvington, 30, defense attorney Max Roesch argued the government violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy by “deputizing” electronic service providers to look at information stored on cellphones.

Deputy Attorney General Angela Raver said electronic service providers strive to keep child pornography off their sites, and people have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they transmit images from their phone to their cloud storage accounts.

Judge Joseph Kubit instructed both attorneys to submit briefs supporting their arguments, and did not immediately rule on Roesch’s motion to suppress the photos.

Kelvington has been charged with 25 counts of child pornography and one count of criminal use of a communication facility — all felonies.

The attorney general’s office filed the charges in September 2023, and Kelvington waived his preliminary hearing that October.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Lisa Ceh, an agent in the attorney general’s office child predator section, testified that she received five cyber tips in May 2023 about Kelvington uploading 391 photos and videos of children performing sexual acts or posing inappropriately.

The tips came from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which received the information from Synchronoss Technologies, the cloud-based storage provider for the content stored on the Verizon Cloud, she said. The tips included Kelvington’s name, address and phone number, she said.

Verizon prohibits storing child porn in its cloud and that policy is spelled out in service agreements to which all users agree, Ceh said.

She said Synchronoss, which intercepts and reviews data sent to Verizon Cloud, uses algorithms to identify child pornography uploads before a person reviews the material.

“It was very obvious they were children,” Ceh said.

The children in the photos and videos were “very young” and some were depicted engaging in sexual activity, Ceh said.

After getting the tip, Ceh said she obtained subpoenas for Verizon, Armstrong, Google and Synchronoss to provide information about Kelvington’s physical and email addresses, and then obtained a search warrant for his cloud account and his home.

When the warrant was served in September, numerous photos and videos of child pornography were found in his cloud storage, and his phone and other electronic devices were seized, she said.

“The depth of privacy is so broad that deputizing a private company to look at my phone goes too far,” Roesch said.