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US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

theguardian.com

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Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#201

Post by lowbloodsugar »

deathanatos wrote: post #187
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #181

Y'all celebrating this like a win, but it's just rubber stamp of dragnets with a few extra steps. Supreme Court could have ruled that geofencing itself was unconstitutional. They did not. Instead: >In this case, she said, Chatrie and the government have disputed – and the court of appeals did not decide – whether the geofence warrant provided the kind of “‘particularized information’ … based on ‘probable cause to bel…

They didn't rule on it because it is out of scope of the matter before the court. The lower courts first have to make a ruling that can be appealed. From the ruling: > The conclusion that a Fourth Amendment search occurred does not resolve this case, because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only searches that are “unreasonable.” When law enforcement officials undertake a search to discover evidence of a crime, the reas…

Right. And there is no chance that the court will side with the liberals when that actually happens.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#202

Post by MintPaw »

ryandrake wrote: post #198
sixothree wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try walking around a grocery store with your phone and take a picture of every person you pass. See how they react. That's the expectation people have for privacy.

Reminds me of the "Surveillance Camera Man" project[1] from a while back, where a guy went around silently filming people in public. People didn't like it and some responded aggressively, even though those same people probably thought nothing of the numerous actual surveillance cameras pointing at them all the time. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46302860

There's a whole category of video content called "First Amendment Audits" where people film with big cameras in public and farm people random, and often quite hostile, reactions.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#203

Post by JoshTriplett »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #199
JoshTriplett wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they should be allowed to point it at places inside their store , with prominent disclosure to people entering. I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.

If I see something weird going on outside my house, should I be allowed to take a picture of it? If I decide to take a picture of what's going on outside my house for no reason at all, should that also be allowed? if I decide to put a camera in my living room pointed out the window and record, should that be allowed? If I decide to run a business out of my home, does that change anything?

Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.

Some things that are not much of a problem at a small scale ("take a picture of a specific strange thing you see happening", "record one license plate of a specific car in relation to an incident") can become a problem at scale ("set up a video camera to constantly surveil the sidewalk and do facial recognition on it", "record every license plate that goes by and correlate your recordings with a million other people to generate a tracking map").

The problem is with pervasive surveillance, not discrete observation, and that's the spirit that laws about surveillance should attempt to uphold.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#204

Post by ryandrake »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #14
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #4

Of course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.

As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.

One of Alito's main points appears to be that a search is not really a search, as long as it's laundered through a third party. Scary that this was 6-3

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#205

Post by anigbrowl »

petcat wrote: post #196
anigbrowl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. It's not the legal norm in the US, but in many countries you are still considered to have a right of privacy when you are outside your home. In Japan, for example, you can be sued for publishing photographs or video of street scenes without either securing permission or redacting the faces of passers-by.

> but in many countries Which countries?

Japan, for example.

You can easily look up which other countries strictly enforce personality rights in public spaces and see for yourself, I'm not here to service you.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#206

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ryandrake wrote: post #204
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.

One of Alito's main points appears to be that a search is not really a search, as long as it's laundered through a third party. Scary that this was 6-3

I'm not too surprised because it's this court. I'm happy we can take the win for privacy rights.

We are very lucky we got this outcome out of this, because at least on its face the warrant was pretty well-behaved: They didn't get any identifying information until they had aggressively narrowed suspects. If someone had a convenient CCTV camera where the call was placed it all would have been moot. It's very possible if this geofence plan had only identified one person, the guilty party, it would be very hard to argue it was unreasonably broad as well. And as Alito did point out, this ruling won't actually get the thief out of his case.

We got a win today where a win certainly wasn't expected.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#207

Post by gandreani »

It's such a little thing but while reading the opinion I see that the court (Kagan in this case?) makes a factual claim it provides SOURCES.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

"Modern cell phones, we observed a dozen years ago, are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S. 373, 385 (2014). Since then, the percentage of Americans who own smartphones has only increased. To- day, more than nine in ten Americans own a smartphone. See W. Bishop, Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (Nov. 20, 2025) (91%); compare A. Smith, Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013) (56%)."

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#208

Post by autoexec »

chpatrick wrote: post #197
DiscourseFan wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.

I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict. It's rarely going to be 100% clear cut so the jury has to use their judgment.

> I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict.

Exactly. It's all about consent of the governed. We need the government to prove that they've got a valid reason to take someone's freedom before we let them do it. That's also why jury nullification is so important. It's another check on government to make sure that we feel that the laws we're being held to and the punishments we'll face when they are broken are acceptable.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#209

Post by sidewndr46 »

qingcharles wrote: post #172
sidewndr46 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The judge doesn't care if the law was violated in collecting evidence.

I had a judge once tell me that the police absolutely have the right to commit crimes to gather evidence in an investigation. (mostly true -- for instance an officer can generally commit innumerable felonies as long as nothing they do violates your personal constitutional rights -- rarely is evidence thrown out because it was obtained in violation of a statute unless that statute includes a provision for exclusion, e…

The individual who would prosecute them also needs to work with them to prosecute civilians. So pretty much, so long as it isn't murder.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#210

Post by sidewndr46 »

harimau777 wrote: post #130
dylan604 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this particular judge didn't for whatever reasoning, but judges definitely prevent a prosecutor from introducing evidence based on how it was collected. This is why concepts like "fruit of poisonous tree" and "parallel construction" exist.

Doesn't parallel construcction mean that judges actually don't care how evidence was collected? They can't possibly care that much if they are fine with a fig leaf like parallel construction.

Parallel construction means the judge doesn't know.
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