Why bother with warrants when cops can buy location data for under $10k?

Legal and moral are two different things, and the police is a public service. Public trust and perception are important because they give legitimacy to government.

The goal is to use illegal means, but not have evidence of that illegal means in court.

This is what has been described as "parallel construction". A quaint turn of phrase for when the police use criminal practices to prosecute "criminals".

Welcome to the future

Edit: Please forgive American English phrasing. [This practice is described as...]

True, if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear. That's why it doesn't matter if the police have the data.

Actually, that's bullshit, as is "Why hide if it's legal?". The obvious answer is that The Court of Public Opinion will convict on many counts that are both legal and ethical.

There is no party to vote for to stop this.

Warrants are needed when the requesting entity doesn't have access.

While I agree, I do understand that legally this is somewhat tricky. As long as the data remains publicly available, I can't see how to outlaw law enforcement from getting their hands on it, if we ban the agencies from buying it you'll just see fusion centers or private outreach groups buy it and gift the police.

So do we ban the sale of such data? I'm in favor of that, but it's both going to be really difficult to pass a law that can run ads saying "this bill wants to triple the cost of your cell service" and outlawing the sale could give an advantage to those capabilities of collecting on their own.

Which leaves us with banning the collection of that data, another thing I'm in favor of that I think will be impossible to pass.

The problem here is this data should not be sold to Joe Q Public.

A warrant protects your belongings from search and seizure. The unfortunate truth is that when you give data away… you give it away. The internet gives people a false sense of privacy because they can use it from inside of their house. But, telling Google where you parked your car during a bank robbery is no different than telling a newspaper reporter where you parked your car during a bank robbery.

The cloud is, and always has been, someone else’s computer.

Let me give a hypothetical example, witness says the see a Ford Bronco leaving a murder scene. Police use this data to find all people in the area at the time of the crime. They then look to see which of those people in the area at the time are registered owners of a Ford Bronco. However, instead of presenting this data they used in court court to see was in the area they will then for instance search for instance traffic camera footage. Moreover, since they have detailed location information now know what traffic cameras to check or what gas stations to subpoena for camera footage ect.. Then they probably get a warrant for that persons car and house or start watching that person ect...

However, what gets presented at trial is the Witness saying they saw a Ford Bronco and the camera footage. Nothing about the detailed phone tracking information. Basically parallel construction allows the LEO and the prosecutor avoid what is colloquially called fruit of the poisoned tree.

Wiki article on parallel construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

Abortion rights in the US were originally based on privacy (the government's right to tell a woman what she could or could not do with her body). Overturning that widened government authority not just over abortion, but 1001 other issues linked to the same core finding. Laws banning sodomy were struck down on the same basis: what two consenting adults do behind closed doors that doesn't affect third parties are a violation of the "right to privacy". The same for interracial marriage.

The same ruling has implications here because the data in question "belongs" to the phone company. But government buying it might violate individuals' right to privacy. Only individuals' right to privacy is now very curtailed.

People think Roe vs Wade was an abortion ruling, but it was really a privacy one, and by overturning it SCOTUS has opened a very large number of social issues to be re-litigated.

I agree it's a stretch to tie it to abortion (and maybe an appeal to emotion/politics?). But there is a link. I wish more people thought about all these issues (plus NSA spying and social media and 101 other things) in terms of one overall right to privacy. It's sort of the issue of our times (which I think West Wing predicted 20+ years ago)

But now that the publicly available data of women seeking abortions can be used to send them to jail, arguments 1 and 2 are easier to disprove. I'm not aware of any previous pro-privacy argument with such clear connection between cause and consequence.