FBI cannot even look at your phone lock screen without a warrant, rules judge

> Judge Coughenour ruled that the police were within their rights to look at the lock screen at the time of Sam’s arrest, as there are circumstances in which a search can be made at the time of an arrest without a warrant.

> Investigators conducting a search later, however, need a warrant, said the judge.

They are the cogs that need to make the security theatre run. I would bet that the vast majority of them know for a fact that their job is highly useless and only see it as a way to get some money at the end of the month.

What I still don't understand is how did we get here and why is it still going on even though most people would agree that it's a security theatre.

Why do they need security clearances? For all that Secret-level intel they're getting briefed on? Or because you're under the impression that clearances are "security-ish"?

You want to mitigate "security theater" by making security wildly more dramatic and aimless. Someone needs to do the basic step of checking bags and passengers. That person does not need to be Jason Bourne.

From what I'm told my grandfather had fun with the cleaning ladies at the pharmacy he worked in by sprinkling flash powder ingredients on the floor, so that when they swept them up together the mix would go off, making a small poof, scaring the cleaning ladies.

Protests and social pressure do work with the right amplitude.

If the government isn't righting its wrongs, it's because you (not necessarily you specifically, but "the people" as a whole) have explicitly put in power the people who are doing the bad things.

This is everybody's fault. Yours included. We all enabled this to happen.

That's the beauty of a democratic system. It clarifies and cuts through to the core of our culture. Americans fear the idea of foreign terrorists more than we fear privacy encroachment, and thus, we were delivered the results of that belief.

The system worked! It represented our wishes perfectly. The problem isn't "them" (the government). It's us.

A high percentage of Americans are informed by domestic "news" and that newstainment has declared Snowden to be the bad guy as you said.

Among ordinary people not into politics and or tech, few know his name. If they do, they almost always also talk about him being a traitor, threat, etc.

To take advantage of whistleblower laws (or at least, gain public sympathy as one), the criminality you’re uncovering would need to be far, far worse.

Whether that's due to the media's portrail of them in film and TV over the years with their omnipotent powers or just the view that the government is an all seeing entity.

So in most people's view he just leaked the governments methods, not the fact they were doing it (and abusin their power in doing so). Because of this the Government can spin this as him leaking their secret sauce rather than them being in the wrong.

The de facto stance of America is that the revelations were not shocking enough to alter the status quo. So post-hoc one could imagine that the exposed NSA could have just been a transparent NSA from the start. But the way the story unfolded, despite not shocking the system deeply, he's still left playing the part of the traitor. He probably did make life more difficult for the NSA though, as I'm pretty sure a lot of people ramped up cybersecurity.

It took me 5 seconds to find this from Pew Research:

>A majority of Americans (54%) disapprove of the U.S. government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts,

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-americ...

Just claiming that people agree with you does not make it so. By your logic the NSA has committed treason because a majority of Americans disapprove of what they're doing.

My main point is that while this is a promising decision, it is very far from the law of the land. And, as the original commenter pointed out, even if the 9th circuit upholds this ruling, the 9th circuit is only one circuit among many, and is often viewed as the most liberal circuit and not necessarily representative of the federal judiciary as a whole.

After the 9th Circuit makes their decision, it could still be appealed to the Supreme Court (which I think is the country’s overall direction the root commenter was referring to).

This kind of issue will come up very frequently in court because everyone has a phone, and it’s very easy for a lock screen to contain incriminating notifications. That kind of evidence is often decisive in court, which makes it an attractive/persuasive argument for appeals. Very likely this will end up in Supreme Court, which means decisions in lower courts are less consequential. The lower courts aren’t going to get to decide this one.