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US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

theguardian.com

131–140 of 311 posts

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy An entire guest list is still a broader fishing expedition than should normally be permitted. Warrants should be much more targeted than that. (Of course, many companies seem happy to give overly broad information without even requiring a warrant...)

A guest list on a single day seems pretty fine grained if you looking for someone who was there on that day. Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.

You have the IP address and the time. For many hotels, that'd give you a specific room number and guest.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#132
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery. I believe this is similar to how they nabbed the Washington State University murderer. The feds compelled Amazon to give them all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders and were able to correlate it to other devices their suspect's phone had been visible to.

Hopeful they used the MAC address to find the phone, then tracked the phone itself, because an IMEI and ICCID are pretty difficult to clone, but a Bluetooth MAC address is trivially easy.

The police already had the suspect in mind. They were just building supporting evidence. It was an airtight case. He ended up pleading guilty because otherwise Idaho would have executed him.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guest list on a single day seems pretty fine grained if you looking for someone who was there on that day. Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.

You have the IP address and the time. For many hotels, that'd give you a specific room number and guest.

With IPv4 there's zero chance of that. At most, you could get all the people who were using [Gmail] around that time. With IPv6, mayyybe, but that assumes the hotel does as much data collection as possible and does it correctly.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#134
post #10

From https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo... Additional details: > The information that Google provided to law enforcement officials came in three tranches. First, Google gave law enforcement officials a list of the 19 accounts (but without the names attached to those accounts) linked to devices that were within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Second,…

It is a little confusing, they ruled that the search was not legitimate, but this didn’t end up helping the defendant? I’m definitely missing an important nuance here but I’m not sure what it is…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see and acknowledge your point. But going back to >Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. Congress ceded FTC to the executive branch. Congress put the Federal Reserve in some magical land, outside the executive branch, that doesn't even make sense. My theory was that SCOTUS ruled the executive had this power over the agencies executive branch. See…

> I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed. I think it's the core question; are there really rules at all? The two rulings make that answer clear, I think. Roberts in Cook says that firing was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". How is the FTC's setup in t…

Slaughter says POTUS can fire commissioners in the executive branch. Cook says Trump isn't King and can only directly fire people actually in the executive branch and Trump wasn't able to prove the federal reserve was situated there.

Prove the federal reserve is in the executive branch, and that the ruling of Cook presumed it was, and then you have a point.

I fail to see the inconsistancy.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#136

rare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly…

Yes, this is the same argument used when the Biden admin during covid pressured the media companies to cancel people and news they did not like for "misinformation" instead of calling it censorship. This and LEOs buying data from Big Corp is just end-running the 1st and 4th amendments which is ultimately fascism.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening You are entirely right, we really need to prosecute presidents who do not follow SCOTUS rulings, like [1] and [2] [1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/joe-biden-student-debt-forgivene... [2] https://www.cato.org/blog/obama-administration-ignores-supre...

I mean, this is the textbook definition of whataboutism. =) But I am indeed of the inclination that we should demand the rule of law from Presidents of all parties. Generally speaking, I am in favor of a significant downsizing of the authority of the President as a whole. They have far too many powers and are granted too much leniency to use them "in case of emergency" which has increasingly just turned into every Pr…

We are in violent agreement

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read both opinions, and am left wondering why "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference" applied to one and not the other.

SCOTUS ruled if something is in the executive branch, POTUS can fire the commissioner. Congress and everyone else explicitly is saying the FTC is in the executive branch, which puts it in a completely different question that regarding the federal reserve. The ruling in Slaughter was not that president can fire commissioners no matter what branch they are in. It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal r…

> It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal reserve lies in the executive branch.

But that's insane, right?

"You can make an agency the President has no control over, but you can't make one the President has some control over."

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the slippery slope that this goes down. The criminal charges were way too low, given the alleged actions. The state admitted it had absolutely no forensic evidence. The judge was perfectly fine with this and selecting a jury that was OK convicting in this circumstance. This pretty quickly pretty us down a path of "you're guilty of at least one crime since you've been indicted, maybe a more seri…

Does that mean that every single conviction from before the days of forensic evidence is necessarily invalid? If the argument is that forensic evidence decreases uncertainty, well, it certainly doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. Convicting anyone of anything is a slippery slope. The only way to be truly sure is to never do it, ever.

The case was a shooting. It seemed remarkable they had neither a gun, spent cartridge cases, blood, flesh, wounds, or anything in the way of physical evidence.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#140

I always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified. - FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails - They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels - They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels - Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_B…

obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
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