Great... now do flock cameras, license plate trackers, basically everything in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369980
US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
281–290 of 311 posts
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#282The 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 wa…
The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.
It's commonly forgotten that the bill of rights simply restricts the government. For nearly 100 years it didn't even apply to state governments but just the federal government.
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#283Birthright citizenship decision coming tomorrow.
Yep. And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues. Feels like there's about to be some pure bullshit spewing from the right flank of this illegitimate court. I'd dearly love to be wrong about this, but I'm not holding out hope. Until alito and thomas are impeached for unconstit…
> And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues.
Care to cite some examples?
In my experience, the "big" cases, that the media has been talking about are all decided to be big after the fact. There are a multitude of cases that everyone is anticipating being big but they are ruled the "right" way and the outrage isn't there.
It seems like everyone has swallowed the partisanship of the SCOTUS hook line and sinker but that's just not how they operate. Almost all of the "conservative" members of the court were appointed almost exclusively on their opinions of Roe v Wade and the "conservative" part of a conservative justice doesn't mean Republican it's a reference to their judicial philosophy. Plus, most of them were appointed at a time where Republicans (and Democrats) had very different political positions and the positions of the Justices don't change with the weather of the parties because of the lifetime appointments.
At this point I'm not sure which members of the various outrage factories actually believe the court works that way or are just throwing out red meat for their readers.
[0]https://apnews.com/live/birthright-citizenship-decision-supr...
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think he’s saying that if the 10 people witnessed a murder via gunshot that it would be mighty suspicious if the state didn’t bother to bring any forensic evidence of the shooting to court and instead relied solely on those eyewitness testimonies. At some point the absence of forensic evidence might look more like a deliberate attempt to keep exculpatory evidence out of reach of the defendant than a good faith atte…
Perhaps, but that coin has two sides. A lot of people have watched a ton of crime shows and that warps their sense of what "reasonable doubt" is.
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#285Earlier 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.
This just means that you can't insist someone is innocent despite overwhelming evidence just because they didn't leave any forensic evidence behind which is completely reasonable.
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites. They were taken to court over both, and they prevailed on the former and lost on the latter: the administration (any administration) is permitted to ask a site for a correction, and it is then truly at the site's discretion. They are not permitted to pressure them.
> The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites.
Like the definitely known and uncontested factual information on the origin of the virus?
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#287It'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.…
The surprising bit is that 10% of Americans DO NOT own a smartphone. That must be exceedingly difficult. Increasingly everyday activities require them, without fallbacks. I presume those numbers exclude children, and then if you account for the infirm, it wouldn't surprise me if we started to get to universal levels of ownership.
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
For example, if you're sitting in your living room with a bunch of other people, many of whom know each other, and two people start fighting, you are all witnessing a crime and you can also all identify the two people fighting. It would be ridiculous to require DNA evidence in that situation.
At the same time though, a bunch of people who know each other and the people allegedly involved could very easily share the same incorrect testimony. You wouldn't believe in bigfoot if 5 guys drinking beers swore they saw him while they were camping. Sending someone to prison or worse is much higher stakes. DNA evidence might be too extreme, but I'd expect some sort of evidence to back up a testimony. "What if the w…
Courts are not solving math equations and despite the popular belief to the contrary, most lawyers and judges are not bumbling fools. But to use math as an example of why you don't need an "impractically high" number of witnesses:
- Let's assume "reasonable doubt" is 0.1%, so you need to be 99.9% sure someone is guilty before voting them guilty
- Let's assume a random witness to a random crime has a 5% chance of getting some material fact wrong through no fault of their own
- Let's assume that if you are on trial, there is a 20% chance you are guilty, based on the assumption if you're guilty and know you're cooked you're more likely to plea out, so the people remaining at trial are the truly innocent, the guilty who think they can beat the case, and the guilty who are just rolling the dice.
In reality, witnesses are probably more than 95% accurate with material facts, especially when these are collected in isolation at different times, probably by different police officers.
And if we're being honest with ourselves, a lot more than 1 out of 5 people on trial are guilty of what they're being charged with. The bar for a DA to bring charges is very high, their entire careers are based on conviction rate.
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.
It's commonly forgotten that the bill of rights simply restricts the government. For nearly 100 years it didn't even apply to state governments but just the federal government.
More context for those not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
#290Earlier 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.
I mean of course if not 10,000 people could stand in a room, watch someone murder another, and then all 10,000 come and testify exactly who it was and what the jury would not be allowed to convict?
If 10000 people witnessed a crime for which there was no physical evidence present, yeah I'd say something is very suspicious and would not convict.