Federal appeals court finds geofence warrants “categorically” unconstitutional
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For example, a small cottage in the woods is burned down with gasoline on a night the owner is absent. The police want to find the arsonist by asking for phones that connected to that tower that night, and there happen to be only 3 results, two of which are known neighbors. Still too broad?
In other words, should some of this hinge on the varying size/specificity of the result-set, rather than the query-parameters in isolation?
> Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained.
Another officer will get an "anonymous tip".
Two cops on The Wire do this, and basically register a tennis ball, hence the name, as their CI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJa1_u-VLE
Still dubious that this would be used that way just because telecoms would be aware of this potential for misuse and would not give the data up without a subpeona or warrant, which under this ruling would not be allowed.
Court: no
Government: how much $ for this data?
Telco/bigtechco: ah, now we're talking
Executive: ...Ah...
You would not get a search warrant in that case unless your car was the only one in the garage. The police don't know if there is three or even one phone connected to the tower in that time, and they should not get a warrant.
Can I say, "well it's probably in one of those 3 cars" so then I can get a warrant?
After the Boston Marathon bombing, they searched a 20-block area for the suspect (and found him). Was that legal?
> In exigent circumstances, or emergency situations, police can conduct warrantless searches to protect public safety. This exception to the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause requirement normally addresses situations of “hot pursuit,” in which an escaping suspect is tracked to a private home. But it might also apply to the events unfolding in Boston if further harm or injury might be supposed to occur in the time it takes to secure a warrant. A bomber believed to be armed and planning more violence would almost certainly meet such prerequisites.
[0]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/04/boston-bomber-ma...
Uh, why wouldn't a cop be allowed to walk/drive/fly-over public roadways in a 20-block area and look from public land in any direction?
Also do note, they knew specifically who they were looking for and had location data from their cellphones [1]. Not a judge, but if I was and somebody wanted a search warrant to find a person at a location and their evidence was the dude's cellphone is there, I'd grant it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Tsarnaev#Manhunt_and_...
Huh? The entire point the parent was making is that they do "know" which cell phones were connected during specific times.
As I understand it, the point is that law enforcement does not know this, and thus they send a request to the service provider for all devices within this geofence within this timebox.
The service provider must then search the entirety of the relevant datastores for devices matching the geo- and time requirements.
If police say they have extremely good evidence to believe the drugs are in the garage, in the scenario you described, a court wouldn't issue a search warrant for the garage including any cars it contains?
I'm genuinely surprised. Is there a name for whatever legal principle prevents the court from doing so? I'd like to learn more about this.
Because from Wikipedia [1], I'd have assumed that this would be a cut-and-dried instance of probable cause [2]. Is it about the vehicle owners being different from the garage owner?
Edit: some quick googling seems to indicate that search warrants in the US can be issued to include all or specifically identified vehicles on a property, but no indication of what conditions need to be met.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_warrant#United_States
Hold up, you state that rather firmly but what's the reasoning that supports it?
What's the rationale that separates 1 car from "several" for probable cause?
____
I feel there's a risk of conflating:
1. Good reason to believe X is somehow involved a crime.
2. Probable cause to search for/inside something owned by X.
While there is a strong correlation between the answers to those two questions, they are definitely not the same.
In the case he's describing you'd just get a search warrant for the garage and everything in it. Or, if you could establish probable cause (which seems likely here) you'd just go look for the drugs.
A judge could always choose to grant the warrant, but with full knowledge that any evidence uncovered will likely be inadmissible. Even if a judge grants such a warrant, it would likely be contested by the service provider (Google), and another judge would need to sign off on it, and likely an appelate court would have to deny certiorari in order. And even if it was allowed, at trial all of this would again be litigated with a fresh set of judges, and once again have to navigate up the apellate courts, and would most likely impair or cripple the prosecution of a case where it was used.
There might be exigent circumstances where the public needs outweigh the prosecutorial damage -- preventing an imminent bombing or something, but for routine criminal matters the geofence warrant is all but dead.
Is there a strong reason to assume one way or another about whether this will get reviewed by the Supreme Court (and if so, whether it would be upheld)? My understanding is that the Fifth Circuit has become a bit notorious in recent years for its rulings being a bit out of the norm and reviewed disproportionately by the Supreme Court, but I don't know enough about whether this decision might be one of those.
Recall that the Supreme Court generally gets to decide what cases it hears and what it’s said about the cases it wants to hear is at https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/supct/rule_10. It basically boils down to cases where there is a conflict between any two chains of appeals (federal circuits and states). But the Supreme Court is lazy (or smart), so when there is a conflict they usually want to see how other judges think and to see if a majority vote will arise. The cases that get granted are therefore normally just from one of the last circuits to adopt a view (often one of the previously espoused views from the other circuits), and I would need to see the data to believe that there is a bias with respect to whether they adhere to the majority view (if it exists).
My intent was for the statement of their decisions being considered extreme and their decisions being reviewed often to be two separate statements, the former an opinion I've seen often and the latter a statistical phenomenon. The latter doesn't imply the former, but I don't think it would be surprising that the former correlates with the latter.
If your house were burned down, and the police canvassed your neighbors do you expect your neighbors to stonewall the police or help you, by helping the police?
In the same scenario you would expect the tower owner to try and help solve that crime of their own volition. So knowing some of the requirements should be attainable in any civilized society.
But that request is not going to make it through normal channels. And most of the customer data (especially PII) is very tightly controlled, so likely no such person exists who can run that job without authorization, and even if they did, they would be immediately fired afterwards, and possibly subject to criminal prosecution for violation of their user's privacy, depending on jurisdiction.
This single ruling, does nothing to make me feel any better about this. Everyone can be swept up in "some digital dragnet" because everyone's data is everywhere, and it's impossible to manage without hauling off to the woods and disconnecting from the internet at large.
The government could get into the business of building [under cover] popular apps so as to gather that data themselves, but that would take a great deal of time and money, and most importantly competence!
I can't see this being fixed until America decides that the rights to our identifying data can't be signed away.
This ruling says you can't subpoena data.
It doesn't say you can't buy it. The free market is an enormous whole in our privacy rights. At the same time, it's crazy that we ourselves put all of our data out there on the free market.
Still, this is a step forward. The step might be to forbid the government bypassing legal protections by buying the data.
I don't feel like this ruling changes my chances of being falsely accused of a crime at all. All it really does is take away a tool police could use to find the right person.
No amount of "checks and balances" and "valid scenarios" will convince them otherwise. They've decided that their arbitrary notion of privacy is some sort of "human right" and will drag us all to hell because of it. In the meantime, they refuse to participate with lawmakers to tread a middle-ground so the laws end up being utterly draconian (see the EU stuff happening in real time) against ordinary citizens.
Oh and don't even get me started on the kicker, whereby most of law-enforcement simply refuses to enforce and prosecute the bulk of uncomfortable crime they encounter (see the US and UK right now where they let criminals loose on their populace because they're afraid of the "optics").
I honestly don't know what kind of f-d up world we're leaving to our children. But they will judge us very harshly for it someday.
A geofence warrant is a type of search warrant that allows law enforcement to collect location data from devices within a specific geographic area (the "geofence") during a particular time period. This warrant enables investigators to:
1. Identify devices present in the area
2. Collect location data, such as GPS coordinates or cell tower information
3. Link devices to specific locations and times
However, until we get clarification from FISA courts we will still have to deal with it. The problem is the line where FISA has been used to acquire information for criminal prosecution rather than for intelligence purposes, and the broader and broader definition of terrorist and the dramatic expansion of domestic watchlists in recent times.
Let’s hope that it gets unilaterally outlawed and then FISA is forced to follow the supreme law of the land in future rulings.
No reasonable expectation of privacy in one's Google location data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40958458 - July 2024 (163 comments)
That the guy's case gets a right affirmed yet in his individual case it won't make a difference has to be a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
The Courts are coming out of this looking even worse than they have been.
The evidence gathered by the now ruled unconstitutional methods is not allowed to be used but the evidence gathered afterwards is still admissable where it normally would not be.
In this case, they can't use the geofence data of their locations as evidence but, after they used that to identify suspects, they can use all evidence gathered afterwards where that would normally not be allowed.
> On November 4, 2022, Smith filed a Motion to Suppress— which the other Appellants joined—seeking to suppress all evidence derived from the November 2018 geofence warrant which was used to identify them as suspects.
They were identified as suspects, and further investigation produced more evidence, which formed the case. What they are saying is that the good faith exception prevents this from tainting all derived evidence in this case, which seems reasonable.
The good faith exception is an exception to the exclusionary rule, not to the admissibility of the evidence itself.
[1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-60321-CR0.pd...
That means they can geofence to get a short list of suspects, and then file proper warrants for some of them if they have more clues?
I'm just trying to guess a gap: engineers tend to see law as more iron, like code, and judge law based on inverse programming: if you can find some set of circumstances that creates a gap where the law isn't obeyed.
Ex. here, you might mean that this doesn't technically stop police from requesting geofenced data anyway, using it to get suspects, then not mentioning it at trial. Yes, technically, the police could ignore this, and request a warrant, then the judge could ignore it, then the tech companies could ignore it, the DA could collude with the police to hide that happened, and pretend they found the suspect a different way.
But it's impractical.
It's hard to spell out why, exactly, tl;dr: death penalty for your career if any of this is discovered by anyone, you can't do it by yourself, and these people are generally on the same team in our distanced analysis, people are tribal, and gov't attorneys/tech companies/judges/police can't rely on eachother's silence.
How many careers have ended over discovery of parallel construction?
It’s actually rather frustrating for me as I used to export and keep the GPS logs, for geotagging photos from a camera, which will need to be done per day now. Nonetheless, a smart move as they simply won’t hold this information anymore - even for those who opt-in to the feature.
There is a cost to living in a free society that needs to be recognized, even though it is still a cost worth paying.
In order to obtain the data that law enforcement would have to "discover" through parallel construction, they need Google to cooperate and run the analysis to give them the required data. They can try to make this request through informal channels, but Google will say that they need a warrant. They can't make the request through formal channels because no judge will give them a warrant. So that's pretty much it.
Law enforcement faces a very high burden to show that parallel construction would apply. (Not "could." Would.) This generally requires law enforcement to show that they were pursuing multiple parallel paths of investigation, and that basic investigatory work in one of the other paths of investigation would have legally led to the excluded evidence as a matter of course. To put it perspective how difficult this is, a former co-worker that is still with the public defender has seen the prosecutor succeed exactly once in 15 years in making a parallel construction argument.
The DEA is the only agency that successfully makes parallel construction arguments on a regular basis, and this is primarily because the DEA has the resources to actively pursue multiple parallel paths of investigation, and because in many cases the reason for using parallel construction is that key witnesses have a tendency to get murdered....
"Well we kicked down the door to your house, which was wrong, but look at all this good evidence we got! I mean, c'mon, the guy is clearly guilty..."
If you intend to kick down a door to find evidence of wrongdoing, anything you find is inadmissible. But if you kick down a door because someone on the other side is screaming for help, evidence of other wrongdoing that you find is admissible still.
Here, they are saying that they had good reason to believe they could operate in the way that they did, so while the geofence evidence itself isn't able to be used, other evidence derived from that work is still usable. But going forwards, no one can use the geofence technique in good faith.
So it doesn't seem like much of a step to "the evidence was screaming to us from inside, begging to be found". It's about the same level of nonsense. ;)
Rebuttal, that seems like a huge step.
> Good faith provides an exception to the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule barring the use at trial of evidence obtained pursuant to an unlawful search and seizure. If officers had reasonable, good faith belief that they were acting according to legal authority, such as by relying on a search warrant that is later found to have been legally defective, the illegally seized evidence is admissible under this exception.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/good_faith_exception_to_excl...
It's unfortunate for the defendant, but does follow existing precedent.
Big Jean-Marc Bosman energy, who essentially changed the face of football (soccer) forever in the 90's because his club didn't want to let him leave, but he didn't play anymore all the trials.
That's how many burglaries are solved in my area. If the exact time of the burglary is known (from alarm or security camera) a very specific warrant is given for all phone activity at or near that time at that location.
I'm hoping if the warrent is more specific (perhaps finding similar burglaries and requesting information only for matches between the two locations) they can still be used.
That's not true. There are many types of properties. Large properties could accomodate large margins of error, multiple times greater than the fine grain location data when using a poont in the middle of the property. There are some types of properties that this couldn't be applied to, such as apartments.
I'm in the latter group.
A mechanism like this allows them to realize the social benefits of that kind of a data trove existing, while providing some kind of a check on the way they use that data. However flimsy that check may be, it still seems really different from the government itself collecting and controlling all that data itself. And if anything, it takes the wind out of the argument that government properly should be the custodians of that kind of data: they can use it in the rare cases where they can describe a clear purpose, but they can’t just go frolicking through the movements of every person in their jurisdiction for funsies [0].
Is it necessarily bad that, in the US system, it turned out to be just the tacky companies slinging ads who control that utterly comprehensive archive of spy data, and it’s the guys with guns who have to ask nicely to access it?
[0] at least not through mobile geolocation data. Contrast with Flock Safety’s nationwide mutual data exchange compacts: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/artic...
This really depend on how you use the data, doesn't it?
If you have a presumption any suspect is innocent, and investigate until you have overwhelming evidence, yes, it does.
If you have a presumption whoever the algorithm selects is guilty, and investigate to prove it, this gives you exceptional capabilities to persecute whoever you catch.
In the case of this geofence kind of data request, though, it seems to self-enforce that a little bit, though, right? If you cast too broad a net, then you “catch” hundreds of people, and the jury rolls their eyes at you pointing the finger at any arbitrary one of them. If you construe the request narrowly, then you get a small number of leads, but those leads are in actual fact that much more incriminating by dint of how precise they are.
In some sense it reminds me of the way the squishier sciences dealt with p-hacking by normalizing preregistration: you kind of have to set the “power” of your request ahead of time, or the black box that spits out the results becomes less useful to you (and less convincing to the people you have to make agree with you).
That said, if some country manages to create a law enforcement organization with the right culture, it does indeed become much less of a problem. But it needs to guarantee the culture won't change either, and that the data won't become available for different organizations.
A request ambiguous enough to net hundreds of suspects seems unlikely to net the investigator a successful prosecution. Not without corroborating evidence, which might be the fruit of a thorough investigation.
But if the initial request leads to an investigation that develops enough evidence to prosecute somebody—that is, if the person really did do the bad thing, and this was one of the ways the government figured that out—what is it that’s so abhorrent about this technique that makes it right to overlook the bad deed?
If the status quo is throwing around nonsense like bite marks and sneaker prints to try and associate somebody with a crime scene, geofenced mobile data requests seem like a smaller rather than a bigger net compared to “everybody with teeth who I have a hunch about” or “everybody who owns Sketchers.”
A successful prosecution is measured by a guilty plea or a finding of guilt. It is not the same thing as justice or convicting the right person. There are mountains of cases where it is clear that prosecutors are playing with dirty tricks for a conviction of anyone, rather than seeking to convict the right person.
I am saying this as a person who got LEO request for JUAN no last name and no other identifiers. As you can imagine, some of us are not amused by such requests.
edit: Location is much, much more telling than basic name and address.
Passing a law is a very high bar, especially with the filibuster, and a President can still veto it. It's supposed to be for checks and balances, but I see a lot of checks and very few balances.
I know that it's not the court's responsibility to fix the rest of the system. But it feels disingenuous to say that the legislature could fix it when they know perfectly well that they won't.
Yes. Despite appearances to the contrary (and the exceptionally lethargic behavior of the current (118th) congress), Congress does actually pass laws (and revisions to existing laws), often in response to deficiencies identified by courts and law enforcement in what is currently on the books. If you're interested in following this, the library of congress website [1] has half-way decent filtering.
> I know that it's not the court's responsibility to fix the rest of the system. But it feels disingenuous to say that the legislature could fix it when they know perfectly well that they won't.
Forget responsibility, it's not even within the court's purview - in order for a ruling to stand (much less set precedent), it must be based on the law as it exists (including past precedent); ignoring that might feel good to watch, and would certainly make life interesting for participants in one specific case... But in no way compensates for an inability to legislate on the part of actual, elected, legislators.
If you're frustrated, vote for congressfolk who get things done vs. blather on, don't wish for a magic judge.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22source%22%3A%22legis...
I’m not 100% clear on what the question is, in the sense that I want to give you a good-faith reading but, of course, the answer is obviously no. I doubt congress has even read any of our posts, haha.
I think the general expectation is that when chatting about politics the best hope we could have is that we could cause the other person (or some other person reading along) to vote differently, and maybe we’ll all get some better representatives if this conversation repeats enough times. It is a pretty indirect strategy, I don’t think it will have any big obvious wins.
> Passing a law is a very high bar, especially with the filibuster, and a President can still veto it. It's supposed to be for checks and balances, but I see a lot of checks and very few balances.
I agree that our system has a lot of checks and might be too logjam-prone. (Although, over the last 8 years we’ve probably both appreciated this feature at some point or another, maybe at different times). But that’s the system we have, we should fix it in an above the board fashion, not hope for judges to circumvent it.
> I know that it's not the court's responsibility to fix the rest of the system. But it feels disingenuous to say that the legislature could fix it when they know perfectly well that they won't.
Well, to be entirely transparent, there’s a dual purpose to this. So maybe it is a bit disingenuous. I mean the ingenuous element is there: it is always good to keep in mind how our system works, and I do think people should target their irritation at the correct party.
But also, not many of our (democratically elected) representatives are willing to argue for increasing surveillance. So the reminder that it is their job is a slightly circuitous way of indicating that it is maybe not a popular idea. If it were, somebody would run on it.
Trivial as in renewing an old law, authorizing payment for the operations they already passed, or naming a post office.
What's left isn't zero, but it's not much more than a handful.
I wouldn't consider a budget bill to be "non-trivial"?
Which seems like the bare minimum and even that much is often too much to ask.
But regardless, of the 78 laws passed only 5 were around appropriations.
Of the remaining 75 they included infrastructure, veterans affairs, trade, hunting, Native American rights, research, workers rights, disaster relief, export laws, internal relations, and crime.
So clearly plenty of laws do get passed by Congress despite your claim of a “high bar”.
What it really sounds like is laws you want aren’t passed but that somehow supports the idea Congress is broken.
People who steal are often of two types, career criminals, pert of an organized (this can be peripheral) crime organization, or drugged out zombies who could not hold a job. There's a possible third, impulse theft by teenagers --these are low numbers.
It sticks in my craw when people so easily imply poor people steal and burgle. All the hand to mouth poor people who on occasion dumpster dove and all that, did not steal things, break into homes etc.
we teach STEM in schools, but we assume that moral behavior is obvious and natural. we don't teach children why moral behavior is important, and more critically we don't teach that moral behavior includes caring for others, and that doing so will benefit all of us. instead we teach children to compete against each other, and we put them in situations where selfish behavior is the best way to get ahead. at best we try to scare them about the risks of crime, but we don't show them the benefits of being helpful instead of selfish.
no education is going to completely eradicate crime, but i do believe there is a correlation between the quality of education and the amount of moral education and crimerates.
Even when I was a student this was the case; we had units and assemblies presenting these concepts to an incredibly frustrating and condescending degree.
which means they are lecturing but not really teaching things in a way that let's kids not only understand but actually internalize and apply what they learn.
this is not an easy task. it requires teachers and all school staff to be good role models and much more. i haven't seen that when i went to school, nor do i see it from my kids (although i have to admit i don't even know what i should expect to see, and how much my own shortcomings in this area mess things up)
one thing that i think matters though is that teaching morals needs to include parents, and that is not happening.
the problem with lecturing is that we keep believing that telling someone what to do or how to behave is enough for kids to pick it up and apply.
it may work for math or basic science, but it most certainly doesn't work for moral behavior. that needs to be practiced and children need to be put into situations where they can apply morals and be allowed to make mistakes.
moral education is not a separate subject, but it needs to permeate all learning in school and outside
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191243/reported-burglary...
Individuals have agency; they are not slaves of any "root cause". The individual decision of a person to burgle may have correlations to statistical characteristics of their situation, but unless we understand the base rate of that set of circumstances we will never be able to address it without restricting the agency of others in that cohort.
And the level of intrusiveness necessary to establish the cohort of individuals requires a degree of surveillance that is ripe for abuse and incompatible with personal liberty.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240810105207/https://www.teleg...
I'm interested by this, could you post some examples?
google dropped that slogan a decade or more ago
I'm for total blind advertising. Non-targeted --not on the individual level. No smaller than ZIP.
First, the Fifth Circuit is conservative. It includes Texas, Louisianna and Alabama. It's become known as the fast-track to the Supreme Court as it has ruled very conservatively at both the district and appellate level. This problem is exacerbated by how the Fifth Circuit is organized where the districts in the circuit are divided into divisions of often 1-2 judges, allowing plaintiffs to very effectively "judge shop".
Second, in modern times the Fourth Amendment has been consistently weakened by successive Supreme Court. A notable example if the 1968 case Terry v. Ohio that allowed police to stop people and search them without probably cause. Another huge example if the whole concept of civil asset forfeiture, which was justified by (IMHO) the most contorted mental gymnastics: this pile of money has no rights. But it was found in someone's car. How is it not their property and thus the Fourth Amendment limitation on unlawful search and seizure should apply?
Third, the Supreme Court will likely take this case up now. Why? Because the Fourth and Fifth Circuits have issued conflicting rulings. That's when the Supreme Court steps in, more often than not.
Fourth, if a user's location data has a rasonable expectation of privacy, it raises the question of what other data has a reasonable expectation of privacy? What about law enforcemen tuse of Stingrays? Or facial recognition systems?
I haven't read the ruling, but this has always struck me as the key problem with geofence warrants that courts have been ignoring. A geofence warrant doesn't just involve a search of the location data that is in the area, it involves a search of all the location data collected worldwide to determine that it wasn't in the area. It couldn't be less localized.
I Am Not A Lawyer
I would imagine someday, police will say geofence every radio detected by a their (or third parties) sensors network and then drive around looking for those radios, or wait until they pass one of their detectors again.
This is in contrast to having a named suspect, and then analyzing their phone data to see if they were in the area? That's still legit discovery?
But I can appreciate the distributed nature of this system
In that case, it's illegal to look in the phone book for names starting with "john" because that's not a specific user.
From the ruling emphasizes a search through the "entire" database as a kind of rummaging through everything in a house, but that's clearly inapt. First, it shouldn't matter whether Google just needs to check an index vs. doing a full scan. Second, there's no reason to assume a digital search has the same privacy implications as a house search. It's just assuming what you're trying to prove. `While the results of a geofence warrant may be narrowly tailored, the search itself is not` is relevant only if the search itself is an invasion of privacy.
So even (especially?) if I preferred the result in this case, that reasoning is not likely to hold up in a conflict with the 4th circuit. It's exactly this kind of weak conflict that gives the Supreme Court too much latitude to draw lines as they see fit.
edit: sorry, removed disrespect for the EFF
That's an absurd reduction, and not at all analogous to the situation discussed in TFA.
However, the court fails to articulate anything close to a workable rule in its reasoning.
Further, because the actual outcome was an upheld search d/t good faith reliance, the finding of unconstitutionality is basically dicta, and would/should be ignored by other districts and even in the same district.
I don't think this ruling offers the protections people want or should have. I think that point stands, however hidden by downvoting.
No. Working with that analogy, this ruling indicates you can't get one warrant that applies to everyone in the book - simply because they are listed in the same geographic area.
A phone-book warrant would not be in harmony with the 4th Amendment.
How would one-log-per-tower be different from a surveillance video tape?
Hmmm... elements of an answer: there is no doubt more in the decision but from the EFF writeup: (1) "individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data", (2) "sensitive information about a person’s associations and allow police to “follow” them into private spaces", (3) "require a provider, almost always Google, to search “the entirety” of its reserve of location data “while law enforcement officials have no idea who they are looking for, or whether the search will even turn up a result.”"
So it sounds like one-log-per-tower would take care of the third point (the warrant would call for 1-4 specific towers or something), but the court still found an expectation of privacy in cell phone location, and an expectation that this sensitive private info might intrude of private spaces. As opposed to a video camera which views a public space.
Only if everyone in the phone book has a privacy interest requiring a warrant to breach in the fact that their name was in the phone book. They don't.
But imagine for a second they did. Then your search for "John" in the phone book would have involved flipping through the phone books pages looking for the "John" section, in the process violating the privacy rights of everyones names you looked at to figure out if you where before or after the Johns section. Of course that would be unconstitutional. It would be like trying to figure out where John lived by searching every apartment until you found the apartment with John's diary in it.