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US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

theguardian.com

261–270 of 311 posts

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#261
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure. A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

>A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery. You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect and force you spend a bunch of money defending yourself. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike... Hopefully rulings like this make that scenario a little less likely to happen, but it doesn't stop it…

one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

> If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

same reason they are really out to disqualify jurors who know about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, the legal understanding is that the Fourth Amendment doesn't guarantee some right that illegally obtained evidence can't be used against you (it merely guarantees that those obtaining the evidence illegally will be punished). The reason why evidence obtained illegally is generally suppressed is to act as a deterrent to the Government. Even if individual officers were willing to risk their own punishment f…

That interpretation is insane to me. If all it takes is, "haha, oops," to use evidence gained from an unconstitutional search, people do not actually have Fourth Amendment rights. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, knowing that civil asset forfeiture is a thing.

You have to consider the fact that it's really weird for everyone to know that evidence against you exists, but be forced to pretend it doesn't and hide it from the jury. It's not at all self-evident that this is the only, or the best possible, remedy against the government abusively collecting this evidence from you. Ultimately it's very important for the good functioning of society that guilty parties are appropriately punished and innocent parties are exonerated, and disregarding evidence can harm both goals. It's of course also important that the government doesn't seize your property or violate your privacy without a reasonable cause, but this doesn't necessarily conflict with the primary goal of justice.

Also, the good faith exception is supposed to be relatively weak - it's supposed, at least originally, to only apply in cases where the officers performing the illegal action had no reasonable way of knowing that it is illegal; the original case is quite clear - a search was conducted in one state based on an out-of-state warrant, and that warrant itself was later deemed to have been improperly issued. I find it quite reasonable to say that the officers conducting the search had no reasonable way of knowing that this warrant was problematic. If the good faith doctrine was watered down so much that an "oops, I didn't know I was breaking the law" from an officer is enough, then the problem lies with these standards, not with the principle.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery. You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect and force you spend a bunch of money defending yourself. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike... Hopefully rulings like this make that scenario a little less likely to happen, but it doesn't stop it…

one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

I mean...yeah?

If someone commits a crime and ten people in the room say they were also in the room and that person did it, that shouldn't get thrown out because the suspect didn't leave a fingerprint.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#265
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.

Reminds me of the Norm Macdonald bit where he says he would not convict someone based on DNA evidence. The punch line is something like "I'm not a scientist, what do I know about DNA?"

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure. A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

>A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no. Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.

Picking 1000+ people at random doesn’t fix that problem

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure. A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

I think you might be confusing what the issue is. As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people. The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that…

I’m fully aware of the privacy concerns here; but that wasn’t the topic I was engaging in.

I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.

When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#268
The implications are far reaching beyond cell phones. any service that stores location data for it's user is subject to 4th amendment expectations _regardless_ of an opt-in. The court specifically rejected the argument that by opting-in the user is abrogating their privacy rights. If you centrally store location data you have an obligation to protect that data under the 4th amendment as private and would require a warrant.

The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#270
Obviously there should be limits but what should they be?

I actually don’t think asking for phone ids for 30min before and after an event within a limited distance IS overly broad. The fact it only returned 19 initial IDs kind of shows that no?

Equally, knowing someone has been in or near a bank is not particularly intrusive. It’s not like searching who visited a lawyers office or a sexual health clinic etc.

So would a 5 min window have been ok? Or a 10minute window?

When does a warrant become “sprawling”?

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