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
When news broke about the affair, I remembered, 6 months prior, watching an episode of the Daily Show where Jon Stewart interviewed Paula Broadwell and they even made jokes about if her husband was jealous of her spending so much time interviewing David Petraeus.
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.
> 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...)
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.
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.
> 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.
Similarly, for the people who don't see the big deal about geo-data, consider that knowing (A) where a phone "goes to work" and (B) where it "sleeps" is usually enough to uniquely identify a person, even when there's a large degree of inaccuracy in the coordinates.
Almost nobody who works near my office lives in my apartment complex, and vice-versa.
The whole Petraeus affair[1] is a wiki 'telenovela'. The only things missing are references to Corintian leather. I will share gossip tomorrow, even if old news.
> 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, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s.
> Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes.
> Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
> A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
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.
> 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 entirely, it just means that the police need to spend 15 minutes to get a rubber-stamped warrant before they turn everyone within a few miles of crime into a suspect.
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.
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 witness was wrong" just seems like always a reasonable doubt, or at least the number of witnesses who would need to corroborate something such that it ceases to be a reasonable doubt is impractically high.
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.
Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?
As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?
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 serious one if we have some evidence".
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.
Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
There's no indication that this guy had to hire a lawyer or actually do anything. The same location data that put him near the scene/time of the crime would also absolve him. I guess it's sad that he felt the need to pay for a lawyer.
Google told him that he would have to go to court to block the release of his identifying data to the police. He was not told what the request was about. At that time, he could only guess that it was related to the break in that happened near his home almost a year ago.
A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect.
He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.
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!
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.
This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.
> 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 entirely different thing.
I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.
Amazon used Echo devices for all kinds of invasive purposes other than advertised. Tracking the bluetooth identifiers of nearby devices is small potatoes compared to other things they've done:
One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:
> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.
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. aren't going to provide here.
I don't think that is ever admitted into the public record or presented to a jury. An expert reviews it and prevents the conclusions. In the even that you had the knowledge to review it yourself, you're excluded from the jury as jurors aren't allowed to question means and methods.
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 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.g. wiretapping laws)
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.
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!
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).
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.
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 legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.
This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.
If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place, does this mean that products like Flock which indiscriminately violate your privacy would now require a warrant for law enforcement to access (currently they do not)?
Where does the ruling discuss public places? The article quotes the ruling as saying, “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location.” I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.
> I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.
Even when the surveillance is being conducted by a private entity? A private entity that's selling access to its private records of the comings and goings of a sizeable chunk of the population to police who are buying specifically because it would be a 4th Amendment violation for them to collect the data themselves?
If it's reasonable for we consumers, who know that cell networks and phone makers are collecting our data, to expect privacy, then it's reasonable to extend that same expectation to operators of ALPR and related techs. There's no opt-out, after all. We can't reject the terms of service.
I suspect the argument against that would be that you contract with the cell service provider and so have a colorable interest as a party to said contract. In contrast you have no such contractual relationship with Flock, and if your government contracted with them on your behalf your remedy is to vote harder.
Would you be happy with a public "petcat tracker" site that published your personal location and image 24/7 whenever you are out in public, from data collected from Flock and other similar products? If you think that would cross a line, you do have some expectation of privacy even in a public place.
Right: This kind of law is supposed to conform to the common expectation, not dictate it!
We all might expect someone could take a photo of us walking down the sidewalk, but that's not the same as "expecting" to be followed by a virtual (or even literal) drone-swarm that constantly catalogues our every movement cross-referenced to potential interactions with everyone else.
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.
> I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.
- United states v Jones
- Carpenter v United States
- florida v jardines
- kyllo v united states
All affirm some level of expectation of privacy in public.
ALPR's, facial recognition, drone surveillance are going to get challenged at some point. GORSUCH in this opinion pontificated on Katz v United States. Highly recommend reading his opinion
If I run into someone at the grocery store, I can remember "oh I saw them yesterday" if the Police interview me. If I start writing down/logging every time I saw that person at the grocery store and plotting it out, I would consider that "crossing the line".
A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.
maybe I wasn't specific enough. If I place a camera in my place so that it can see who is coming/going that also just happens to capture what's outside the window then that's just how it's going to be. If you don't like it, you can pound sand. You are not going to tell me how I can/can't place cameras inside my place.
Many jurisdictions already have laws about where you can point cameras "in your own place", including when they point out of your place. For instance, you are already not allowed to point a camera out your window at someone else's home, or into their backyard. You also can't legally record audio in most places. We should have more such restrictions on surveillance as the pervasive use of surveillance has become more of a threat.
It wasn't bait posting at all. It was a question for critical thinking. The rude was started with the response to that question. If you think you can tell me what I can do in my own place, you'll get a rude response as well. Where do you get off telling me what I can/cannot do in my private place?
I would like to visit the park without several large cameras staring me down at every junction now.
I would like to go to various establishments, or maybe even political meetups, without being profiled by insurance agents and law enforcement officers. Especially now that it seems simply attending a political meeting could land me decades in prison.
I would, as the US Supreme Court just reaffirmed is my right, not like to have my location continuously tracked immediately upon leaving my home via such a camera network. Otherwise this entire ruling is just subverted by adding a few extra steps.
Particularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.
I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince
When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
The CJ decides who writes the opinion of the majority if in the majority, and the dissent if in the dissent. Its the job of the CJ to bring sides together in clear oppositions, and "horse trade" between bits and pieces of a decision so that its clear where a majority/minority lie.
The CJ's foremost political role is to ensure the judicial branch of government is seen as a politically legitimate institution which wields its power against the other branches in a constitutionally and poltiically legitimate way. If that slips, congress can start hiring/firing; and the executive, in the end, controls the guns -- they can be arrested.
To avoid being arrested or fired, the court has to keep all sides believing the rules they set are fair.
They have no power, in the end, but the power they are allowed to have. They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
I'll refer you to article 50 of the constitution of the USSR,
> Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.
which is to say, "constitutions" as pieces of paper, do not matter. A constitution isnt a document, its literally, how power is constituted by the people.
Paper has no magical power to bring about anything in the world.
One day, decades or centuries or millenia from now -- there will be no USA SC: at one point they will have been arrested, or killed, or retired and not replaced. At once point democracy in the US will fail, and the US will fail, and something else will replace it. Sic transit gloria mundi. So it goes. History goes on.
The world isnt a program, words are not its code. History goes along because power as insittuitionalised by groups of apes, comes and goes.
Yes but the Constitution has to actually be followed for it to work. The Supreme Court has no military or police, if the President chooses to disobey them and the military and police follow the President's orders... there isn't much the Court can do about it. The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening right now.
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 President declaring everything they want to do an emergency. Presidents should be subject to prosecution for misconduct, and upheld to the highest standards of the law, and we should have systems in place to swiftly and effectively remove them if they do not meet them. The bar for impeachment and removal is too high when it is unattainable in a two-party system where the President controls one of those parties.
So very specifically I've historically read Roberts as a fairly moderate jurist. He has a true romanticism about the neutrality of the court and that it shouldn't be a political body. (This is ridiculous, but anyways.) This has changed as the court has reached a 6/3 bias. When the court was a 5/4, Roberts could swing to the center and bring the majority position with him. But now the far right wing doesn't need his help: The conservative wing can do a 5/4 even with his dissent. So you see Roberts bucking the conservative trend much less, maybe not because he agrees with the court but knows he can't push the outcome to the center.
The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.
She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.
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.
With the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.
> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job.
They have repeatedly reduced Congressional powers, including today, where they basically said Congress can't setup genuinely independent agencies (in Slaughter). Or when they kneecapped the VRA.
Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.
> Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.
It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.
Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.
It obviously depends on what rules they make. They can't make a rule creating a body of government employees that decide the substance of rules (not just implementation details), and then also has armed officers to enforce those rules, with its own judges to have hearings specific to those rules. Whether you heard ice or atf when you read that, they both fit. I like Gorsuch's opinion. He clearly calls out this danger of a half step of saying the president has complete control of the executive without also ruling the agencies themselves are unconstitutional. Realistically though instantly removing all those agencies would mean chaos. The court can't rule how to fix something, only that the rock brought before them is the wrong rock. The telling bit would be if someone then brings them a case where the removal of the ftc leadership has resulted in the agency not enforcing the laws as written. If they then side with the congress I would give them the benefit of my doubt. But I do also feel like their positions, while correct, are correct only out of the context of their environment.
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. Seems SCOTUS doesn't want to touch federal reserve question with a 10 foot pole. But going back to my original theory, it is a slightly different framing, since everyone involved freely agrees FTC is an executive agency while the federal reserve does not enjoy this agreement.
I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed since you're not starting with the assumption the agency in question is an executive agency. SCOTUS seems to have ruled that an agency in the executive branch has executive control, while not going so far as to determine that the federal reserve is in the executive branch which is an entirely different question.
It's important to note SCOTUS is too chickenshit to rule on anything but in the most narrow way possible. If you ask them to rule on something with a prior established fact that it's in the executive branch you're likely going to get a very narrow ruling that doesn't try to create a unifying theory of everything.
> 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 this regard not part of the same tradition? What part of the Constitution permits the Fed's existence outside of any of the branches? Why can Congress establish a central bank outside the Executive entirely, but not regulate the FTC?
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.
Congress fucks up as well. There's as pretty strong argument that "independence" from the executive power vested in the POTUS and legislative branch puts that power in a place not authorized anywhere in the constitution, and for good reason, as the design of the constitution intends elected office to have direct control over powers of congress and the executive.
Yeah, that's why we have the veto power; as a check on their power.
SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes. "Those rules we agreed to, signed into law, and followed for the last 90 years? HAHA PSYCHE SUCKERS!"
Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.
The US constitution lays out three AND ONLY three branches of government. The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment. If they create an agency in the executive branch, by definition it reports to the head of the executive.
> The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment.
Sure. So explain the results of Trump v. Cook, which involve exactly that.
The same justice, on the same day, issued one opinion that says Congress can't put limits on firing FTC chairs, and another that Congress can put limits on firing Fed board members.
Did you read the opinion? SCOTUS only said a process was broken by a step being missed. Trump can still fire Cook, just has to let Cook have a hearing about it. Nowhere that I see did they say Trump must at all consider what Cook says at said hearing or be bound by it in any way - only that she must be able to get a hearing. This does not seem to contradict his authority to fire her. Just like your job's HR will gladly give you a hearing about terminating you, even if their minds are all made up and nothing you say will change a thing.
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 reserve lies in the executive branch.
Your attempt here to falsely portray an inconsistency that doesn't exist. It's a different question as to whether the federal reserve is in the executive branch. You'll have to show the federal reserve is in the executive branch if you want the same ruling to apply or claim this inconsistency.
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.
I agree in general, but this is also why I say allowing authoritarianism through technicality. They know by punting to Congress, a body that is completely paralyzed, what the practical outcome of that ruling is.
I agree that motive is likely in at least one justice. But at the same time, if they really wanted to get back to original principles, they would have to take a wrecking ball to virtually every agency without being able to provide any substitute for the load bearing bits. I think these artificially narrow rulings are what some of the justices think is the middle ground to work in that direction without bringing the roof down. Thomas in particular has advocated for simply taking out the walls and trusting congress and the states will somehow fix everything and it isn't their problem. I think his opinions have occasionally been horribly flawed, but I see his vision and get what he is hoping for. I suspect something like that is the only way a representative democracy could recur in the US. Right now, states with strong geographic bents towards authoritarianism can use power of the federal executive to strengthen their position. If the federal executive had no agencies and was powerless the way Thomas suggests, those states wouldn't have much impact. But that entails acknowledging the entirety of the federal bureaucracy is unconstitutional and creating all sorts of power vacuums. Who knows how that would turn out? I increasingly think it couldn't be worse than the likely end state of a federal autocracy if we don't.
> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
How do you jump to that conclusion? theGoog decided they didn't want to deal with it because it was a hassle not because it was a liability issue. Congress critters would need to get together to make data hoarding a liability and I just don't see that ever happening
A hassle is a liability. Not, like, a legal liability but definitely a financial one.
The more we make it inconvenient and expensive for companies to hoard this data, the more they will learn it’s not worth it. A lot of the time data is collected “just in case” or for features nobody uses. Companies will learn the hard way that this is a liability to their bottom line and operations, and give it up.
IANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?
It’s raising the bar for doing these searches. Essentially saying some government investigator can’t go “oh well if we had this data we might find something interesting, so let’s get the data.” The court here is saying these geofenced searches smell a lot like such a fishing expedition hoping to find something interesting.
Rather you should have evidence that a specific person did a specific thing and need to conduct a search to find additional evidence of said person doing said thing.
The 4th amendment protects US persons from the government just doing generalized searches in hopes that it will turn up useful info. You have a right to privacy from the government unless the government can clear a high bar showing probable cause that you’ve done something wrong.
Google Maps switched from storing location history in the cloud to storing it on your phone for "better privacy," so the geofencing warrant used in this case wouldn't work anymore.
However, other apps might record location history in the cloud, so there might be an impact there?
It's mostly punting on the issue. They determined that it was a "search" under the 4th amendment but made no ruling on whether or not it was "reasonable". It's back to lower courts to decide on that.
Google, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.
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 unconstitutional rulings and bribery, there's nothing worth hoping for.
It's disturbing that the statistic you cite does give me hope (if true). But if I had an account, I'd still put $50 against it. I'm cynical enough to at least entertain the possibility that these corrupt dickheads have let the market get that lopsided as a way to cash in on top of their odious ruling (by way of bribes after they make other people richer).
People are maximally incentivized to be right because of the monetary risk and reward.
A 94% odds indicates an extremely high likelihood that something is going to happen. It's relevant because it's a different, additional perspective than whatever a news article says.
It's a 2500℅ ROI if it's not struck down, so I would encourage you to bet if you think the outcome will be no.
Presumably the justices (or their clerks) have told their friends how they're going to rule, and their friends have told their friends, and that's made the market. Or that's supposed to be the value prop of Polymarket.
There's precedent. Roberts was so angry that someone leaked the Dobbs decision that he spearheaded the investigation that found that nobody would admit to leaking and there's nothing they can do.
Because Polymarket is full of corrupt folks with insider information. Trump Jr. Is a senior advisor to Polymarket. Iran admitted they would observe Polymarket bets during the height of the war to see when they were next likely to get bombed.
This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.
In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone.
Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.
For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:
- identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks
- disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria
- determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers
- identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers
"armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty."
I will never understand how some people look at this stuff and immediately think that what we need is more EHLO doubly encrypted VPNs with DNS over HTTPS and paid with crypto5.0
> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
If he had not opted in to that, only the NSA and intelligence-industrial complex would have had access to his Google location history, while with that option, regular police had enough political clout to demand it. They might lose that ability (although even that is not entirely clear), but the under-the-table mass surveillance of everybody will continue just like before.
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 turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.
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.
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_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...
When news broke about the affair, I remembered, 6 months prior, watching an episode of the Daily Show where Jon Stewart interviewed Paula Broadwell and they even made jokes about if her husband was jealous of her spending so much time interviewing David Petraeus.
https://archive.org/details/COM_20120127_020000_The_Daily_Sh...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Assuming the hotel had customer specific login info and the person you are looking for was using it, sure.
In this case it was a warrant, and the Supreme Court’s ruling does not hold that the warrant violated the fourth amendment.
Edit: looks like I misunderstood what you were referring to by “this case”
> 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.
Similarly, for the people who don't see the big deal about geo-data, consider that knowing (A) where a phone "goes to work" and (B) where it "sleeps" is usually enough to uniquely identify a person, even when there's a large degree of inaccuracy in the coordinates.
Almost nobody who works near my office lives in my apartment complex, and vice-versa.
The whole Petraeus affair[1] is a wiki 'telenovela'. The only things missing are references to Corintian leather. I will share gossip tomorrow, even if old news.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal
obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
This is also a great example of map resection.
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, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s.
> Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes.
> Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
> A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
Link to ruling:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
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.
> 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 entirely, it just means that the police need to spend 15 minutes to get a rubber-stamped warrant before they turn everyone within a few miles of crime into a suspect.
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.
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 witness was wrong" just seems like always a reasonable doubt, or at least the number of witnesses who would need to corroborate something such that it ceases to be a reasonable doubt is impractically high.
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.
Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?
As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?
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 serious one if we have some evidence".
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.
Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.
>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.
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
I mean in this case it would also have helped not to have $100k in cash from a bank robbery laying around.
There's no indication that this guy had to hire a lawyer or actually do anything. The same location data that put him near the scene/time of the crime would also absolve him. I guess it's sad that he felt the need to pay for a lawyer.
Google told him that he would have to go to court to block the release of his identifying data to the police. He was not told what the request was about. At that time, he could only guess that it was related to the break in that happened near his home almost a year ago.
A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect.
He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.
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.
> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery
Yes, everyone knows to steal a phone from someone you hate and bring that to the robbery. Right?
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.
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe this data is persisted, unless they tore open the device to extract logs.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/amazon-releases-echo-dat...
This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.
This smells like an urban myth.
I don't think it's implausible that an Echo would have an internal list of trusted Bluetooth devices and their last date of connectivity.
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 entirely different thing.
I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.
Amazon used Echo devices for all kinds of invasive purposes other than advertised. Tracking the bluetooth identifiers of nearby devices is small potatoes compared to other things they've done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:
> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/amazon-partners-with-tile-to...
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. aren't going to provide here.
> 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.
I don't think that is ever admitted into the public record or presented to a jury. An expert reviews it and prevents the conclusions. In the even that you had the knowledge to review it yourself, you're excluded from the jury as jurors aren't allowed to question means and methods.
I mean, yeah, I wouldn’t even bring my phone to a legal protest. Or, I’d at least shut it down.
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
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.g. wiretapping laws)
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.
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!
> [E]ven if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
How is this even remotely a possibility?
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).
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.
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 legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.
This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.
So, all you need is a magistrate that rubber stamps every warrant and it removes all protections from search and seizure from anyone?
Rubber-stamping every warrant without regard for Constitutional and other legal standards would not be operating in good faith.
Would that not, by definition, preclude the argument that the warrant was obtained in good faith?
Because there are way too many existing precedents where "acting in good faith" was sufficient to overcome the Fruit of the poison tree doctrine.
This court doesn’t care about precedent.
If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place, does this mean that products like Flock which indiscriminately violate your privacy would now require a warrant for law enforcement to access (currently they do not)?
Where does the ruling discuss public places? The article quotes the ruling as saying, “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location.” I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.
> I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.
Even when the surveillance is being conducted by a private entity? A private entity that's selling access to its private records of the comings and goings of a sizeable chunk of the population to police who are buying specifically because it would be a 4th Amendment violation for them to collect the data themselves?
If it's reasonable for we consumers, who know that cell networks and phone makers are collecting our data, to expect privacy, then it's reasonable to extend that same expectation to operators of ALPR and related techs. There's no opt-out, after all. We can't reject the terms of service.
I suspect the argument against that would be that you contract with the cell service provider and so have a colorable interest as a party to said contract. In contrast you have no such contractual relationship with Flock, and if your government contracted with them on your behalf your remedy is to vote harder.
> If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place
I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.
What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?
Would you be happy with a public "petcat tracker" site that published your personal location and image 24/7 whenever you are out in public, from data collected from Flock and other similar products? If you think that would cross a line, you do have some expectation of privacy even in a public place.
Right: This kind of law is supposed to conform to the common expectation, not dictate it!
We all might expect someone could take a photo of us walking down the sidewalk, but that's not the same as "expecting" to be followed by a virtual (or even literal) drone-swarm that constantly catalogues our every movement cross-referenced to potential interactions with everyone else.
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.
> I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.
- United states v Jones
- Carpenter v United States
- florida v jardines
- kyllo v united states
All affirm some level of expectation of privacy in public.
ALPR's, facial recognition, drone surveillance are going to get challenged at some point. GORSUCH in this opinion pontificated on Katz v United States. Highly recommend reading his opinion
If I run into someone at the grocery store, I can remember "oh I saw them yesterday" if the Police interview me. If I start writing down/logging every time I saw that person at the grocery store and plotting it out, I would consider that "crossing the line".
A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.
What if the grocery store has a security camera pointed at the door that records 24/7? Should they not be allowed to do that?
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.
So what if they mount inside pointing outside?
Was "I don't think they should be allowed to" ambiguous?
maybe I wasn't specific enough. If I place a camera in my place so that it can see who is coming/going that also just happens to capture what's outside the window then that's just how it's going to be. If you don't like it, you can pound sand. You are not going to tell me how I can/can't place cameras inside my place.
Many jurisdictions already have laws about where you can point cameras "in your own place", including when they point out of your place. For instance, you are already not allowed to point a camera out your window at someone else's home, or into their backyard. You also can't legally record audio in most places. We should have more such restrictions on surveillance as the pervasive use of surveillance has become more of a threat.
Baitposting followed by rudeness and aggression makes for a poor discussion.
It wasn't bait posting at all. It was a question for critical thinking. The rude was started with the response to that question. If you think you can tell me what I can do in my own place, you'll get a rude response as well. Where do you get off telling me what I can/cannot do in my private place?
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.
You're suggesting people can look through your briefcase, purse, backpack without a warrant in a public place.
> What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?
I believe my papers and effects should NOT be subject to unreasonable searches.
I would like to visit the park without several large cameras staring me down at every junction now.
I would like to go to various establishments, or maybe even political meetups, without being profiled by insurance agents and law enforcement officers. Especially now that it seems simply attending a political meeting could land me decades in prison.
I would, as the US Supreme Court just reaffirmed is my right, not like to have my location continuously tracked immediately upon leaving my home via such a camera network. Otherwise this entire ruling is just subverted by adding a few extra steps.
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.
She's not as big on some of the broader interpretations of the 4th amendment that more civil liberty minded justices would lend credence to.
Particularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.
I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince
When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
The court is legitimate by every measure, regardless it it matches your political views. Starting the contrary is honestly extremism.
Genuinely curious:
What does it mean for a Chief Justice to be in control of their court, and of course, for them to be out of control?
The CJ decides who writes the opinion of the majority if in the majority, and the dissent if in the dissent. Its the job of the CJ to bring sides together in clear oppositions, and "horse trade" between bits and pieces of a decision so that its clear where a majority/minority lie.
The CJ's foremost political role is to ensure the judicial branch of government is seen as a politically legitimate institution which wields its power against the other branches in a constitutionally and poltiically legitimate way. If that slips, congress can start hiring/firing; and the executive, in the end, controls the guns -- they can be arrested.
To avoid being arrested or fired, the court has to keep all sides believing the rules they set are fair.
They have no power, in the end, but the power they are allowed to have. They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
> They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
That is entirely not at all what the us constitution says
In the case of the legislative branch, the Constitution actually says pretty much exactly that. See Exceptions Clause of Article III, Section 2
I'll refer you to article 50 of the constitution of the USSR,
> Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.
https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/Russian/const/77cons02....
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which is to say, "constitutions" as pieces of paper, do not matter. A constitution isnt a document, its literally, how power is constituted by the people.
Paper has no magical power to bring about anything in the world.
One day, decades or centuries or millenia from now -- there will be no USA SC: at one point they will have been arrested, or killed, or retired and not replaced. At once point democracy in the US will fail, and the US will fail, and something else will replace it. Sic transit gloria mundi. So it goes. History goes on.
The world isnt a program, words are not its code. History goes along because power as insittuitionalised by groups of apes, comes and goes.
Yes but the Constitution has to actually be followed for it to work. The Supreme Court has no military or police, if the President chooses to disobey them and the military and police follow the President's orders... there isn't much the Court can do about it. The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening right now.
> 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 President declaring everything they want to do an emergency. Presidents should be subject to prosecution for misconduct, and upheld to the highest standards of the law, and we should have systems in place to swiftly and effectively remove them if they do not meet them. The bar for impeachment and removal is too high when it is unattainable in a two-party system where the President controls one of those parties.
Our country does not need kings of any party.
We are in violent agreement
So very specifically I've historically read Roberts as a fairly moderate jurist. He has a true romanticism about the neutrality of the court and that it shouldn't be a political body. (This is ridiculous, but anyways.) This has changed as the court has reached a 6/3 bias. When the court was a 5/4, Roberts could swing to the center and bring the majority position with him. But now the far right wing doesn't need his help: The conservative wing can do a 5/4 even with his dissent. So you see Roberts bucking the conservative trend much less, maybe not because he agrees with the court but knows he can't push the outcome to the center.
The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.
She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.
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.
With the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.
> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job.
They have repeatedly reduced Congressional powers, including today, where they basically said Congress can't setup genuinely independent agencies (in Slaughter). Or when they kneecapped the VRA.
Some of them likely subscribe privately to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory.
Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.
> Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.
It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.
Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.
Statutes don't supersede the constitution and passing one doesn't create that power.
> Statutes don't supersede the constitution…
"We can make rules the President has to follow" does not supersede the Constitution.
It obviously depends on what rules they make. They can't make a rule creating a body of government employees that decide the substance of rules (not just implementation details), and then also has armed officers to enforce those rules, with its own judges to have hearings specific to those rules. Whether you heard ice or atf when you read that, they both fit. I like Gorsuch's opinion. He clearly calls out this danger of a half step of saying the president has complete control of the executive without also ruling the agencies themselves are unconstitutional. Realistically though instantly removing all those agencies would mean chaos. The court can't rule how to fix something, only that the rock brought before them is the wrong rock. The telling bit would be if someone then brings them a case where the removal of the ftc leadership has resulted in the agency not enforcing the laws as written. If they then side with the congress I would give them the benefit of my doubt. But I do also feel like their positions, while correct, are correct only out of the context of their environment.
> It obviously depends on what rules they make.
Today, the Court ruled that Congress can make the Federal Reserve an independent agency, but not the FTC. Same day, same justice!
What are the rules, exactly?
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. Seems SCOTUS doesn't want to touch federal reserve question with a 10 foot pole. But going back to my original theory, it is a slightly different framing, since everyone involved freely agrees FTC is an executive agency while the federal reserve does not enjoy this agreement.
I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed since you're not starting with the assumption the agency in question is an executive agency. SCOTUS seems to have ruled that an agency in the executive branch has executive control, while not going so far as to determine that the federal reserve is in the executive branch which is an entirely different question.
It's important to note SCOTUS is too chickenshit to rule on anything but in the most narrow way possible. If you ask them to rule on something with a prior established fact that it's in the executive branch you're likely going to get a very narrow ruling that doesn't try to create a unifying theory of everything.
> 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 this regard not part of the same tradition? What part of the Constitution permits the Fed's existence outside of any of the branches? Why can Congress establish a central bank outside the Executive entirely, but not regulate the FTC?
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.
In this case, it did, that's why SCOTUS ruled against it.
SCOTUS does not enjoy papal infallibility. They fuck up.
(Or act maliciously, as when Alito invented the new "history and tradition" test.)
Congress fucks up as well. There's as pretty strong argument that "independence" from the executive power vested in the POTUS and legislative branch puts that power in a place not authorized anywhere in the constitution, and for good reason, as the design of the constitution intends elected office to have direct control over powers of congress and the executive.
Yeah, that's why we have the veto power; as a check on their power.
SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes. "Those rules we agreed to, signed into law, and followed for the last 90 years? HAHA PSYCHE SUCKERS!"
Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.
> can't setup genuinely independent agencies
The US constitution lays out three AND ONLY three branches of government. The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment. If they create an agency in the executive branch, by definition it reports to the head of the executive.
> The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment.
Sure. So explain the results of Trump v. Cook, which involve exactly that.
The same justice, on the same day, issued one opinion that says Congress can't put limits on firing FTC chairs, and another that Congress can put limits on firing Fed board members.
Did you read the opinion? SCOTUS only said a process was broken by a step being missed. Trump can still fire Cook, just has to let Cook have a hearing about it. Nowhere that I see did they say Trump must at all consider what Cook says at said hearing or be bound by it in any way - only that she must be able to get a hearing. This does not seem to contradict his authority to fire her. Just like your job's HR will gladly give you a hearing about terminating you, even if their minds are all made up and nothing you say will change a thing.
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 reserve lies in the executive branch.
Your attempt here to falsely portray an inconsistency that doesn't exist. It's a different question as to whether the federal reserve is in the executive branch. You'll have to show the federal reserve is in the executive branch if you want the same ruling to apply or claim this inconsistency.
> 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.
I agree in general, but this is also why I say allowing authoritarianism through technicality. They know by punting to Congress, a body that is completely paralyzed, what the practical outcome of that ruling is.
I agree that motive is likely in at least one justice. But at the same time, if they really wanted to get back to original principles, they would have to take a wrecking ball to virtually every agency without being able to provide any substitute for the load bearing bits. I think these artificially narrow rulings are what some of the justices think is the middle ground to work in that direction without bringing the roof down. Thomas in particular has advocated for simply taking out the walls and trusting congress and the states will somehow fix everything and it isn't their problem. I think his opinions have occasionally been horribly flawed, but I see his vision and get what he is hoping for. I suspect something like that is the only way a representative democracy could recur in the US. Right now, states with strong geographic bents towards authoritarianism can use power of the federal executive to strengthen their position. If the federal executive had no agencies and was powerless the way Thomas suggests, those states wouldn't have much impact. But that entails acknowledging the entirety of the federal bureaucracy is unconstitutional and creating all sorts of power vacuums. Who knows how that would turn out? I increasingly think it couldn't be worse than the likely end state of a federal autocracy if we don't.
PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
Fantastic. One step closer to making holding personal data a liability.
How do you jump to that conclusion? theGoog decided they didn't want to deal with it because it was a hassle not because it was a liability issue. Congress critters would need to get together to make data hoarding a liability and I just don't see that ever happening
A hassle is a liability. Not, like, a legal liability but definitely a financial one.
The more we make it inconvenient and expensive for companies to hoard this data, the more they will learn it’s not worth it. A lot of the time data is collected “just in case” or for features nobody uses. Companies will learn the hard way that this is a liability to their bottom line and operations, and give it up.
good. Of course the precise language of the ruling matters, but good.
IANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?
It’s raising the bar for doing these searches. Essentially saying some government investigator can’t go “oh well if we had this data we might find something interesting, so let’s get the data.” The court here is saying these geofenced searches smell a lot like such a fishing expedition hoping to find something interesting.
Rather you should have evidence that a specific person did a specific thing and need to conduct a search to find additional evidence of said person doing said thing.
The 4th amendment protects US persons from the government just doing generalized searches in hopes that it will turn up useful info. You have a right to privacy from the government unless the government can clear a high bar showing probable cause that you’ve done something wrong.
Google Maps switched from storing location history in the cloud to storing it on your phone for "better privacy," so the geofencing warrant used in this case wouldn't work anymore.
However, other apps might record location history in the cloud, so there might be an impact there?
It's mostly punting on the issue. They determined that it was a "search" under the 4th amendment but made no ruling on whether or not it was "reasonable". It's back to lower courts to decide on that.
Excellent, I wonder how this might impact things like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712
It will offer this company and those similar to it the ability to increase shareholder value by selling amalgamated information to law enforcement.
Google, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.
Birthright 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 unconstitutional rulings and bribery, there's nothing worth hoping for.
There's a 94% chance the EO is struck down on polymarket.
It's disturbing that the statistic you cite does give me hope (if true). But if I had an account, I'd still put $50 against it. I'm cynical enough to at least entertain the possibility that these corrupt dickheads have let the market get that lopsided as a way to cash in on top of their odious ruling (by way of bribes after they make other people richer).
And what are the odds in Vegas? How is the opinion of a bunch of gamblers on polymarket relevant?
People are maximally incentivized to be right because of the monetary risk and reward.
A 94% odds indicates an extremely high likelihood that something is going to happen. It's relevant because it's a different, additional perspective than whatever a news article says.
It's a 2500℅ ROI if it's not struck down, so I would encourage you to bet if you think the outcome will be no.
Presumably the justices (or their clerks) have told their friends how they're going to rule, and their friends have told their friends, and that's made the market. Or that's supposed to be the value prop of Polymarket.
There's precedent. Roberts was so angry that someone leaked the Dobbs decision that he spearheaded the investigation that found that nobody would admit to leaking and there's nothing they can do.
Because Polymarket is full of corrupt folks with insider information. Trump Jr. Is a senior advisor to Polymarket. Iran admitted they would observe Polymarket bets during the height of the war to see when they were next likely to get bombed.
I think it'll be upheld.
What if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?
This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.
In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone.
Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.
For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:
- identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks
- disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria
- determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers
- identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers
In fairness, I mean, if the people collecting the data sell it on the open market, then you can't realistically expect it to be private.
The only solution in that case is to make it illegal to sell the data. And that's never gonna happen in the US.
That is the loop hole IMO and that's how they will get around it.
"armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty."
I will never understand how some people look at this stuff and immediately think that what we need is more EHLO doubly encrypted VPNs with DNS over HTTPS and paid with crypto5.0
They think that because governments have a nasty history of killing tens of millions of their own people and need to be restrained.
Finish your point?
> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
If he had not opted in to that, only the NSA and intelligence-industrial complex would have had access to his Google location history, while with that option, regular police had enough political clout to demand it. They might lose that ability (although even that is not entirely clear), but the under-the-table mass surveillance of everybody will continue just like before.
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 turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.
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.
It’s again legal for the US government to publish propaganda targeted against their citizens,
so you’ll struggle to ever know for sure what’s unadulterated US media.