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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.

So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.

Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?

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> The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law.

But the Supremacy Clause says the Constitution overrides Virginia law.

If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.

> If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.

Yes, but the only way to do that is to say that the dead hand of the founders overrules current Virginia law. The plaintiffs want James Madison from his grave to impose restrictions on the police that voters in Virginia in 2026 have declined to impose.

That’s how it works.

Virginia voters similarly can’t legalize slavery or ban the New York Times. The age of the restriction is irrelevant.

> The age of the restriction is irrelevant.

Not according to the comment I was responding to: "Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws."

There's more than one bit of flow chart here.

Things can change in a way that's covered by the Constitution. Say, technology that makes Fourth Amendment violations easier to do; still potentially covered!

Things can change in a way that's not covered by the Constitution. Now you need an amendment.

The Fourth Amendment is quite broad and can thus handle all sorts of change.

You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question:

> Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws

... the answer is "Oh boy, Chatrie sure does hope nothing has changed, and the Founders would have hated geofencing had they had any way to know what it was! Otherwise, the laws passed in the past 50 years say it's legal and fine."

No, it doesn't. The person I'm responding to is using semantics to claim the 4th amendment didn't mention scope and therefore privacy against search is irrelevant. My point is that acting as though the constitution of the us is some infallible holy text leads society down a path with learned priests interpreting arcane texts (you are here). Instead of acting as a rational society and addressing a need for citizens to have privacy in a changing technological world.

Debating who the "we" is is losing the forest for the trees--we're wading into a conversation debating the power of a state or local municipality instead of looking at the actual issue where the federal government isn't protecting is citizens because "technically the slaveowners didn't say cell phone in their document".

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