This just looks like standard police work? What am I missing here?
I understand this is a private venue and not police but the principle is the same. She wasn't caught hacking anything or breaking in to anything she just wanted to see the dancers. The big problem with geo fence warrants is that they lead to a 1984 style big brother surveillance state. For example: should the police constantly get everyone's cell phone tower ping data and automatically issue speeding tickets for every 5 minute window someone was speeding?
> If we get to the point where that becomes the case [...]
Then it will be far too late to do anything about it.
You're obviously going to be convicted of speeding if your geolocation data shows you going 80mph for an hour on the expressway, right? Do you really want to wait until this case shows up in court to try to prevent this kind of dystopia from emerging?
See the current top post about individualized suspicion.
You might want to conjure up a different example. I am having trouble considering enforcement of speed limits to be dystopian.
There are toll roads all around the US that conclusively prove tens of millions of people are speeding every day for many decades now, just from the entry and exit point time data.
Government leaders have yet to start mailing everyone automated speeding tickets.
What would be dystopian would be if that data collection was applied to protected activity or especially to unrelated activities: your attendance at a non-violent protest leading to your student loan rates going up, a religious prosecutor starting to “preemptively” investigate teachers & other government employees who went to a Pride parade, etc.
'The EFF sees the tremendous scope and power of geofence warrants as a bug, not a feature. “We believe that geofence warrants are unconstitutional because they don’t start with a suspect,” says Lynch. “They don’t rely on individualized suspicion, which is what’s required under the Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution]. In the January 6th context, it’s likely that there were many journalists whose data was provided to the police.”'
I get the politicians in D.C. might have trouble to see what's in front of them, but Im unsure the population is so against it.
Perhaps you can. History has shown that most people cannot.
Some kid (I suspect) wrote a naughty racist word on sone piece of playground equipment (easily cleaned off) and the reaction by people on an unofficial town FB group were amazing. One person called for cameras everywhere and the imprisonment of parents if their kid was recorded writing a racist or w/e word.
Hell the whole defund the police thing started turning into an alternative where there are cameras everywhere. I’m pretty sure that will be the future.
It questions: are the trade offs worth it?
I suppose the corrolary being: what if this protest was more legitimate but the police was corrupt?
I live in China myself so I find it interesting to ask this question before it's fully done and lost, even if I feel I know the answer: yes, it is worth it, and you'll never shock people with stories of criminals being founds thanks to general surveillance as much as they're shocked by unsolved horrendous crimes, so the abuses will be tolerated (or hidden thanks to the new structure of standard police work) as price to pay, when a critical mass of crimes that could have been solved will be reached.
And I am sad to tell you, that trading freedom for safety is paradise, and when I left the scary city I lived in before to Hong Kong where I live now, I felt such a surprised relief at the total absence of small crimes (all citizens prints are stored on a central database for instance, all 7M of us can be found in an instant). I'm never going back, they can read my emails and track my phone.
They discussed their plans openly on social media then streamed evidence of it after the fact.
Ignoring the question of whether the ability to hide from law enforcement is a necessary component of liberty even when one has committed a crime, these guys weren't even trying very hard to cover their tracks.