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Comment by Jimmc414 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the recent ruling against blanket cell tower data searches wouldn't have affected the Mark Gooch case. In that insatnce, investigators used targeted cell phone data (ie "geofencing") to track his movements, not a mass data collection. Under the new standards, this type of focused surveillance would still be permitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBBTfy29WKI

They absolutely wouldn't have caught him without the cell phone data, highlighting in my mind, the fine line between privacy and safety, which is something I personally struggle to articulate clearly. While it's reassuring this ruling wouldn't affect this case, I can easily see how "tower dumps" could be misused. It's confusing, though, that the judge ruled this unconstitutional action permissible "just this once." Either it's unconstitutional or it's not. Judges shouldn't have the authority grant one-time exceptions.

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The judge's opinion explains this in detail. It depends on the so-called "good-faith exception" to the exclusionary doctrine.

The idea is that if the police tell the truth in their warrant application of what they are looking for and why, the judge issues a search warrant, and the police lawfully execute the warrant, then there's no point in suppressing the evidence just because, years later, it's determined that the warrant should not have issued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception

There is a point: protecting the accused against unconstitutional searches. That certainly seems important.

Whether the police violated the constitution in good faith or not is irrelevant when it comes to the rights of the accused.

There's no point in protecting one individual against an unconstitutional search that proves him guilty. The constitutional issue is the ability to have conducted the search in the first place. The only reason we suppress accurate, but unconstitutionally obtained evidence is to disincentivize the action in the future. This "good-faith exception" strikes that balance pretty ideally.

The defendants rights were violated, but there is no doubt about the legitimacy of the data, and what it implies. Police now know they cannot use this method in the future, so suppressing the evidence in this particular case does not disincentivize anything, as long as its made clear that it cannot be done in the future.

What you're saying would be true if the law were black and white, but in reality there are countless grey areas.

In those cases, suppressing the evidence would go a long way to disincentivize actions the police know are likely unconstitutional but there's enough uncertainty for plausible deniability.

"Police now know they cannot use this method in the future"

I wish I had as much confidence in a finger wag as you do but unfortunately I think it'll work more like Pavlov.

> Police now know they cannot use this method in the future, so suppressing the evidence in this particular case does not disincentivize anything, as long as its made clear that it cannot be done in the future.

It disincentivizes constitutional crapshoots where they throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It incentivizes using already known-good techniques where possible.

“This method” is also frequently scoped very narrowly. Next time they can get the data from a slightly different place, and it’s suddenly a new case. Or they filter the time or device info slightly differently. There are a bajillion permutations one could argue about in good faith.

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