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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

#141

Post by mothballed »

ceejayoz wrote: post #138
mothballed wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

If you ask me personally, I think the federal reserve as a non-executive non-congressional agency is insane, yes. But as a legal question I would hope the president has to establish the control he's exerting is actually in the executive branch before he tries to exercise constitutional powers of the executive branch that supersede contradictive law.

It would be pretty nuts if the president could just fire whomever he wants no matter what branch they are in based on a simple declaration he considers them to be in the executive branch.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#142

Post by [deleted] »

mminer237 wrote: post #133
JoshTriplett wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#143

Post by xboxnolifes »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #131
xboxnolifes wrote: post #107

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.

Assuming the hotel had customer specific login info and the person you are looking for was using it, sure.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#144

Post by zamadatix »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #131
xboxnolifes wrote: post #107

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.

The IP address on hand is probably the hotel's public address used for NAT, especially in 2012. This means you'd need to have full NAT logs + source port + something like a captive portal setup that forces the user to identify the room to be able to tie (externalIp, sourcePort) to (user, room). The captive portal type isn't unheard of for hotels, even in 2012, but the NAT logs... it's no surprise they had to ask for the room list.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#145

Post by Refreeze5224 »

bee_rider wrote: post #33
js2 wrote: 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…

I think they left it to the lower court to decide if the search was legitimate in particular. They ruled in general that geo-fence warrants are not OK. Not a lawyer though!

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#146

Post by rootusrootus »

BeetleB wrote: post #60
petcat wrote: 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.

Source for this? As I recall, his phone was off when he committed the murders. In fact, they used the evidence that it had been turned off just for the duration of the murders (with some padding) against him. If you're going to commit a crime, don't suddenly turn off your phone if you don't have a history of doing so!

Or just leave it at home on your bedside table where you ought to be sleeping instead of out killing.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#147

Post by Natsu »

tantalor wrote: post #73
alexpotato wrote: post #52

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…

It's also a good demonstration how probable cause is supposed to work. In this case, the subpoena probably looked something like "this email must have been sent by one of your guests, so give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy". Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.

> Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.

In the case before SCOTUS, there was a witness who mentioned seeing the suspect in a particular area and that they were on their phone. So it's not a large inferential leap to say that call records would lead to evidence of who the witness saw in this particular case.

That said, Minnesota has an even broader right, so even this sort of warrant might not pass muster in states like that.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#148

Post by rootusrootus »

ceejayoz wrote: post #76
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original claim is: > all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders which is just not how this stuff works. I'd believe it if, say, debug-level logs were being recorded locally. But that would be an incredibly stupid way to burn through your flash storage. But that's besides the point. A record of the last date of connectivity for trusted devices is an…

My car shows "last seen" on its Bluetooth connections. The murderer in this case was an invited friend; it's hardly implausible he's connected to Bluetooth there. > I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. That they obtained access to the Echo's internals via Amazon is evidence. It sounds like you want proof of a very particular bit of data being in it, which I'd guess the FBI etc. are…

> The murderer in this case was an invited friend

Huh? More and more I feel like I must not be thinking about the same Idaho murder case that y'all are talking about.

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#149

Post by tsimionescu »

plagiarist wrote: post #79
ChrisKnott wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just means they were completely transparent with the court when getting the data, and believed themselves it was lawful. What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.

In retrospect, the part I quoted is very unclear for what I intended. I should have added more. What's hard to believe is the data is apparently still allowed in the case. Like... how?

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 for illegal search or seizure (say, maybe they believe they are acting for the greater good), the evidence will generally be suppressed so that there is no rational gain from these illegal actions.

However, if the officers who obtained the evidence illegally were acting under good faith, then there is no deterrence obtained from suppressing the evidence they obtained. They did not act to illegally obtain evidence, in a way that they might be deterred from doing again if the evidence is suppressed - they thought they were collecting the evidence legally so they would do this again. So, in this case, there is no point in suppressing the evidence - no one is harmed by it being admitted (because, again, the Fourth Amendment doesn't promise you that illegally obtained evidence would not be used against you, it just promises that the Government will do all it can to avoid illegal search and seizure).

Re: US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

#150

Post by rootusrootus »

Aerroon wrote: post #125
twoodfin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the police got a warrant, exactly as this decision now says was required. And there's something called the "good-faith exception" for unreasonable warrants: If you get a warrant where it's required (or in this case, where the government tried to argue it wasn't!), and a magistrate grants that warrant, it's a legal warrant so long as all participants were acting in good faith, believing their actions to be leg…

So, all you need is a magistrate that rubber stamps every warrant and it removes all protections from search and seizure from anyone?

Would that not, by definition, preclude the argument that the warrant was obtained in good faith?
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