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:
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.
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 sheer tradecraft necessary for privacy and anonymity these days is so absurd. One would need to do things like somehow buying burner phones untraceably, removing the battery when not in use and only ever turning them on in a specific location that's completely unlinked from one's normal everyday activity, and only use the phone for one specific purpose in order to prevent identity cross contamination. The depths of compartmentalization necessary for this stuff almost seems to require that the person develop a split personality.
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.
This is also a great example of map resection.
obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
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)?
> 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?
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?
If I see something weird going on outside my house, should I be allowed to take a picture of it?
If I decide to take a picture of what's going on outside my house for no reason at all, should that also be allowed?
if I decide to put a camera in my living room pointed out the window and record, should that be allowed?
If I decide to run a business out of my home, does that change anything?
So what if they mount inside pointing outside?
Reminds me of the "Surveillance Camera Man" project[1] from a while back, where a guy went around silently filming people in public. People didn't like it and some responded aggressively, even though those same people probably thought nothing of the numerous actual surveillance cameras pointing at them all the time.
> 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
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.
We do have semiprivate places in public, for example bathrooms, based on an expectation of privacy. There is no reason that expectation cannot be changed or extended in ways.
The cases covered under the 4A:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
"persons", "papers" and "effects"; just because I am in public does not give the police carte blanche to search me.
I do. It's not the legal norm in the US, but in many countries you are still considered to have a right of privacy when you are outside your home. In Japan, for example, you can be sued for publishing photographs or video of street scenes without either securing permission or redacting the faces of passers-by.
> but in many countries
Which countries?
Japan, for example.
You can easily look up which other countries strictly enforce personality rights in public spaces and see for yourself, I'm not here to service you.
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.
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.
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.
You are missing the point. It's not that Flock cameras are not intrusive (they are, I fully agree) but that your contract with the cell service company gives you some legal standing to claim you were injured. If your municipality erects flock cameras and you don't like them, you don't have standing in the same way because a) you are not a customer of flock with contractual rights that can be enforced, and b) elected officials are legally authroized to do things because they won political office via election. So unless you discover they were bribed by Flock or engaged in some other corrupt activity, you don't have the legal standing to complain about a policy outcome you dislike.
PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
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
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?
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As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.
One of Alito's main points appears to be that a search is not really a search, as long as it's laundered through a third party. Scary that this was 6-3
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Any warrant must be extremely specific and limit the scope as far as possible.
Warrants 99% of the time are rubber stamped and issued for either something non-existent or very flimsy evidence and needs to be stopped in its tracks.
> 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.
IMHO a more important ruling "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner and overturns major restraint on presidential power":
> More broadly, Monday’s decision was a major victory for proponents of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers.
* https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724538
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
AIUI, independent agencies created by Congress are no longer independent.
This is not the topic of this post, why not submit this separately?
There are actual cases of false murder accusations occurring simply because the wrongly accused person simply happened to be within X number of meters of the crime scene. They simply walked past the wrong place at the wrong time with their phone.
This is partly why I use GrapheneOS.
PR stunt. They already have raw access to everything anyway.
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:
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.
"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?
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.
Y'all celebrating this like a win, but it's just rubber stamp of dragnets with a few extra steps. Supreme Court could have ruled that geofencing itself was unconstitutional. They did not. Instead:
>In this case, she said, Chatrie and the government have disputed – and the court of appeals did not decide – whether the geofence warrant provided the kind of “‘particularized information’ … based on ‘probable cause to believe that Google had information’ that would help solve a crime.” Therefore, the court sent the case back to the lower court for it to make that determination.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...
They didn't rule on it because it is out of scope of the matter before the court. The lower courts first have to make a ruling that can be appealed.
From the ruling:
> The conclusion that a Fourth Amendment search occurred does not resolve this case, because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only searches that are “unreasonable.” When law enforcement officials undertake a search to discover evidence of a crime, the reasonableness standard generally requires that they seek a warrant from “a neutral and detached magistrate,” Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14, who may issue a warrant only when “probable cause is properly established and the scope of the authorized search is set out with particularity,” Kentucky v. King, 563 U. S. 452, 459. The warrant issued here, as described earlier, was an uncommon, multi-step one, and the parties have contested the legality of each stage of the search process it authorized. The Fourth Circuit did not address the questions that unusual warrant raises. Because this is “a court of review, not of first view,” Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U. S. 709, 718, n. 7, the Court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause
Right. And there is no chance that the court will side with the liberals when that actually happens.
> 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.
The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites. They were taken to court over both, and they prevailed on the former and lost on the latter: the administration (any administration) is permitted to ask a site for a correction, and it is then truly at the site's discretion. They are not permitted to pressure them.
"Permitted" is doing a lot of work there.
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.
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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.
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.
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".
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?
I think you might be confusing what the issue is.
As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.
The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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!
“Had acted in good faith”
Seems like there’s no point in having the constitution if a violation of it has no effect.
The effect is going to be on the issuance or not of new warrants going forward in this domain.
The police could not have foreseen this ruling. It was not previously known that such warrants were unconstitutional. Now we know. Now judges are not to issue such warrants.
> [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?
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.
So, all you need is a magistrate that rubber stamps every warrant and it removes all protections from search and seizure from anyone?
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.