How a Radio Shack Robbery Could Spur a New Era in Digital Privacy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When even the defense is saying that you don't actually need a warrant to search phone GPS records, only to conduct long-term nonspecific espionage then the goal-posts have moved so far beyond anything recognizable as rights and into a land of bizarre technicalities with arbitrary bright-lines in the sand completely devoid of the intented meaning of the bill of rights. Here's the only question they should be asking: did you get a warrant? No? Then fuck off.
If you want to submit evidence to convict someone in a court of law, you have to first demonstrate to an unbiased third party that you have the right to gather that evidence. The meaning of that amendment was plain to common people in 1791 and it means the same thing in 2017. Warrant first then you can use it as evidence.
That's some scary excrement right there. There needs to be a much larger burden or proof than location info. Even if a suspected phone is at 8/8 locations (like the robbers have a way of steeling an someone's phone and putting it back before/after a robbery just to help incriminate someone else). (See the movie Rampage)
I don't think you are reading this right. This wasn't some random person who happened to be in the same place as the robberies. I believe one of the robbers testified that he was their ringleader.
I feel like the cellphone data needlessly jeopardized the whole operation. A judge would probably have given an actual warrant to search online data for 12 people on the contact list of the robber. But this is the thing: the police in this case were used to getting by without a warrant and so probably didn't think twice about getting all that data (which they should). The question being considered is whether that warrant less search is illegal.
If SCOTUS does overturn this decision, the guy's conviction would be thrown out causing much outrage. I hope they do: the privacy laws are clearly not strong enough.
SCOTUS rules all the time to reverse precedents set by a lower court while moving finding of fact to the original venue.
I know some distrust Cato, but please read the following and tell me, how do we protect ourselves from such as this without dragging it out in the open?
https://www.cato.org/blog/stash-house-stings-when-government...
So we best hope the Supreme Court decides there was over reach in gathering cell data because its apparent some district courts are more than willing let law enforcement create a crime and manufacturer criminals as needed
Which one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampage
There are valid reasons why cellular provider would create that information in the first place - largely to do with automated network repair stuff (you can find malconfigured neighbor lists in CDMA systems for example), or automated network metrics.
The issue isn't creating this kind of data, its excessive retention, warrantless government use of it, and using it as another revenue stream to tell it to third parties - but the generation itself on the surface seems perfectly valid.
Exactly. As Maciej Ceglowski (@idlewords) has put it, companies should view data as nuclear waste: http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
I would say it's more like human waste: it's necessary, and you can do useful things with it, but you don't want to keep it around.
Storing some of this stuff might be valid for diagnostics and network planning, but it is mostly stored as part of government required (meta)data retention policies. Whether telcos really have to store this kind of data is somewhat questionable and certainly jurisdiction-specific, but usually they just dump all signalisation traffic somewhere and are done with it with the expectation that it is simpler and cheaper to store all of it than to design (which involves legal analysis) and implement some kind of filtering mechanism.
If i want to trade there, i am perfectly capable of inputting the various digits and such each time, thank you very much.
So I'll thank you for not making it more of a pain in the neck to buy stuff online than it already is.
Most other non-Amazon shopping carts have checkboxes like "Store this credit card for future purchases" but I imagine we could make better payment solutions by pushing all risk to a QR code (instead of NF) + Apple/Android Pay + payment agreement button on the phone.
Every time a case with an innocent starts winding through, the government drops the case, after having caused much grief to the innocent in question, rather than risk having their surveillance powers curtailed.
There is no known program to monitor in real time the position of every citizen - right now all of the data the government uses is incidental to the voluntary use of another service. I don't take much issue with the service generating that data - but in no case should it be considered commoditizable nor should the government be able to access it on a whim for whatever purpose the government sees fit.
Right now the process is working as defined, the law exists to constrain abuses, and to a lesser extent prevent them - but the presumption of the founders was that government will always try to take the maximum amount of power it can, and that the courts exist largely to strike the balance.
Would the opposite be true? If my phone isn't at the location of the crime, can I argue that I also wasn't there?
Therefore a criminal just needs to leave his/her cell phone at home and present the location data as evidence.
If it isn't clear yet: the cellphone records were used to find the suspected ringleader (the appealing person in the case). They weren't the sole evidence for his conviction by lower courts.
If the Supreme Court can do this, then perhaps it could bring the Second Amendment law into the modern era.
While Fourth Amendment law needs some serious reconsideration of the mechanism by which the protections are best given effect given new technologies and social context, that’s a lot smaller issue than addressing the modern realization of the goals of the Second Amendment.
That is exactly true, but the problem with abiding by a written constitution is that as long as the words are in there, it is the Supreme Law of the land. Its rather unfortunate, but its one of the risks assumed when a country decides on the Constitutional System. And all the political partisanship makes it unlikely that this will be changed (i.e. Constitution changed) anytime soon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarmament_of_the_German_Je...
You could argue that a 'modern' reimagining would disarm all citizens...except that this would leave us 1) without a militia and 2) with only a military...directly commanded by the President.
If you want to reduce the number of deaths per year, there are better ways to do it. I highly recommend providing a means of getting mental health care to people who need it--except that many people who like being able to have a weapon on hand for self-defense won't want to go, as they fear their ability to defend themselves will be taken away if they are declared to be of unsound mind. The paranoid will refuse because it'll seem like a conspiracy to disarm them, and the sane will refuse because they'd rather not give up the ability to wield a weapon, particularly against a regime that already mirrors the Nazis in uncomfortable ways.
In the case of both amendments the laws enacted surrounding them are the issues. In the case of the fourth amendment there are problematic laws such as civil asset forfeiture that are overreaching and result in the lost of property loss with little to no resource. In the case of the second amendment the laws are usually created by people who don't even know how guns work at a fundamental level.
Fair enough, then, what fundamental knowledge about guns do you feel would be necessary to enable a lawmaker to enact more reasonable gun legislation?
Off on a tangent the best two examples of bad/attempt legislation I can think of at the moment:
1.) Bans on "silencers". They're actually called suppressors and they don't silence anything. Suppressed weapons typically still have a noise level over 100 decibels and hearing protection still must be worn.
2.) Bans on "scary weapons". The color or stylistic choices of a weapon does not change how deadly a bullet is when it hits a fleshy target. In general bans on characteristics of firearms that do not change how deadly they are.
Best two examples of loop holes that got around poorly written legislation that resulted in wonky interpretation by the ATF:
1.) Bump stocks and hand cranks to get around automatic weapon bans. No one needs automatic weapons for sport shooting or hunting. While I don't speak for everyone I would never want an automatic weapon for either of those since it is useless for them and just wastes ammunition. Current ATF rules require every shot be accompanied by an user initiated action such as a finger movement. So technically those two devices create an user initiated action for every shot per the ATF's interpretation of the written laws. For example a manual hand crank is allowed since the user has to continually perform the action, but the same crank operated by a powered motor and switch would not be allowed since a single user action would result in more than one shot fired.
2.) Being able to shoulder a pistol with a stock that was not intended to be a stock.(Arm brace) This is a weird area of the law. AR-15 pistols(barrel length under 16") are not allowed by shouldered since they are pistols, but you can attach an arm brace and shoulder it anyway. The ATF recently more or less gave up enforcing it since firearms evolved and changed so much since it was original written.
There is a lot more in depth in the world of firearms I could into and how easy it is for a gun owner to accidentally commit a felony due to bad legislation.
I believe you're correct that a lot of gun legislation is driven by an unreasonable fear of guns, and that those laws simply aren't effective as a result. However, I also believe there is also an unreasonable fear among a lot of gun owners regarding the motives behind gun control as well.
That's funny, I've described a lot of computer laws like that, often specifically with regards to government search of people's data.