US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections | Hacker News Reader

US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections

theguardian.com

613 pointscdrnsf297 comments

From https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...

Additional details:

> The information that Google provided to law enforcement officials came in three tranches. First, Google gave law enforcement officials a list of the 19 accounts (but without the names attached to those accounts) linked to devices that were within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Second, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s.

> Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes.

> Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.

> A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.

Link to ruling:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.

I believe this is similar to how they nabbed the Washington State University murderer. The feds compelled Amazon to give them all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders and were able to correlate it to other devices their suspect's phone had been visible to.

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe this data is persisted, unless they tore open the device to extract logs.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/amazon-releases-echo-dat...

This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.

This smells like an urban myth.

I don't think it's implausible that an Echo would have an internal list of trusted Bluetooth devices and their last date of connectivity.

The original claim is:

> all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders

which is just not how this stuff works. I'd believe it if, say, debug-level logs were being recorded locally. But that would be an incredibly stupid way to burn through your flash storage.

But that's besides the point. A record of the last date of connectivity for trusted devices is an entirely different thing.

I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.

My car shows "last seen" on its Bluetooth connections. The murderer in this case was an invited friend; it's hardly implausible he's connected to Bluetooth there.

> I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place.

That they obtained access to the Echo's internals via Amazon is evidence. It sounds like you want proof of a very particular bit of data being in it, which I'd guess the FBI etc. aren't going to provide here.

> The murderer in this case was an invited friend

Huh? More and more I feel like I must not be thinking about the same Idaho murder case that y'all are talking about.

I don't think that is ever admitted into the public record or presented to a jury. An expert reviews it and prevents the conclusions. In the even that you had the knowledge to review it yourself, you're excluded from the jury as jurors aren't allowed to question means and methods.

Amazon used Echo devices for all kinds of invasive purposes other than advertised. Tracking the bluetooth identifiers of nearby devices is small potatoes compared to other things they've done:

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

One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:

> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/amazon-partners-with-tile-to...

> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.

You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect and force you spend a bunch of money defending yourself. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

Hopefully rulings like this make that scenario a little less likely to happen, but it doesn't stop it entirely, it just means that the police need to spend 15 minutes to get a rubber-stamped warrant before they turn everyone within a few miles of crime into a suspect.

I mean in this case it would also have helped not to have $100k in cash from a bank robbery laying around.

>You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect

Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?

Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure.

A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

I think you might be confusing what the issue is.

As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.

The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.

> reasonable expectation of privacy

That cracks me up honestly.

Imagine in the 1980s if every citizen was compelled to carry a ghetto blaster with 100W amplifier and speakers that relentlessly blared our SSN, phone number, home address and bank accounts.

In biblical times, of course, lepers were legally compelled to identify themselves and warn others with analogous methods.

Now today we all voluntarily carry around radio transceivers that loudly blare unique identifiers, perpetually, omnidirectionally, to anyone and anything that will listen.

Wired connections are so aggressively deprecated that we’re also perpetually exchanging every private conversation, and every secret SMS MFA code, and every DNS lookup, over public airwaves.

It’s not our fault and it’s beyond our control, but if you carry such a ghetto blaster, don’t cry to us about expecting privacy.

I’m fully aware of the privacy concerns here; but that wasn’t the topic I was engaging in.

I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.

When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.

>A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.

Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.

Picking 1000+ people at random doesn’t fix that problem

Surely one of those thousand can be made to look guilty enough for a prosecution. Solves the problem of looking like you're doing something real well.

The system does not care about prosecuting criminals. It cares about prosecuting people for crimes. While it may prefer to prosecute criminals for their specific crimes that is by no means a hard requirement.

one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?

As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?

I think you're missing the slippery slope that this goes down. The criminal charges were way too low, given the alleged actions. The state admitted it had absolutely no forensic evidence. The judge was perfectly fine with this and selecting a jury that was OK convicting in this circumstance. This pretty quickly pretty us down a path of "you're guilty of at least one crime since you've been indicted, maybe a more serious one if we have some evidence".

Does that mean that every single conviction from before the days of forensic evidence is necessarily invalid?

If the argument is that forensic evidence decreases uncertainty, well, it certainly doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.

Convicting anyone of anything is a slippery slope. The only way to be truly sure is to never do it, ever.

The case was a shooting. It seemed remarkable they had neither a gun, spent cartridge cases, blood, flesh, wounds, or anything in the way of physical evidence.

The question remains what they did have.

presumably the local noble didnt like them, and the jury knew to follow along.

the south is also known for putting people in prison without even having a charge. just a guilty result

In terms of physical evidence? None.

Evidence, not physical evidence. The instructions seem entirely reasonable.

There is no hard rule for physical evidence. If other evidence is enough to convince 12 jurors beyond a reasonable doubt, it could be very significant.

The standard of both investigations and the effectiveness of mostly part time police were pretty low. Most police were elected or appointed officials with deputized staff. The levels of training and professionalism were poor.

Why do you think many places would execute petty thieves? So few were caught generally speaking the punishment had to be severe.

They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.

For example, if you're sitting in your living room with a bunch of other people, many of whom know each other, and two people start fighting, you are all witnessing a crime and you can also all identify the two people fighting. It would be ridiculous to require DNA evidence in that situation.

At the same time though, a bunch of people who know each other and the people allegedly involved could very easily share the same incorrect testimony. You wouldn't believe in bigfoot if 5 guys drinking beers swore they saw him while they were camping. Sending someone to prison or worse is much higher stakes. DNA evidence might be too extreme, but I'd expect some sort of evidence to back up a testimony. "What if the witness was wrong" just seems like always a reasonable doubt, or at least the number of witnesses who would need to corroborate something such that it ceases to be a reasonable doubt is impractically high.

Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.

Or perhaps the standards of evidence established for a pre-industrial society when eye-witness testimony was the best that could reasonably be achieved is not necessarily the optimal system for a digital society where everyone carries a high definition video camera in their pocket at all times.

Yes a high definition video camera that is slowly becoming indistinguishable (and has always been subject to tampering regardless) from an artificially generated version. We never have anything beyond judgement.

This is why crimes used to have prosecution time limits. Nobody expected eye witness accounts to surface after 40 years. But DNA is eternal.

DNA is not eternal, but neither is anyone's memory trustworthy for that long.

Prosecution time limits and those pesky rights people have is why so much stuff that would've been simple misdemeanors 70+yr ago is now "administrative" and "civil" law.

But in what way do you believe these standards are inadequate? Video from phones is used in courts when available and admissible.

I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict. It's rarely going to be 100% clear cut so the jury has to use their judgment.

> I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict.

Exactly. It's all about consent of the governed. We need the government to prove that they've got a valid reason to take someone's freedom before we let them do it. That's also why jury nullification is so important. It's another check on government to make sure that we feel that the laws we're being held to and the punishments we'll face when they are broken are acceptable.

Jury nullification is a double edged sword. There are near countless examples of a jury determining a white man killing a black man isn’t a valid reason to take the white man’s freedom.

It's a nitpick, but testimony under oath is evidence to US courts. All evidence is either testimonial or circumstantial.

An old lecture on unreliability of witnesses:

https://youtu.be/GrAME1p2Ijs

Courts are not solving math equations and despite the popular belief to the contrary, most lawyers and judges are not bumbling fools. But to use math as an example of why you don't need an "impractically high" number of witnesses:

  - Let's assume "reasonable doubt" is 0.1%, so you need to be 99.9% sure someone is guilty before voting them guilty
  - Let's assume a random witness to a random crime has a 5% chance of getting some material fact wrong through no fault of their own
  - Let's assume that if you are on trial, there is a 20% chance you are guilty, based on the assumption if you're guilty and know you're cooked you're more likely to plea out, so the people remaining at trial are the truly innocent, the guilty who think they can beat the case, and the guilty who are just rolling the dice.

You still only need 3 witnesses telling the same story to reach >99.9% assurance of guilt. The odds of an innocent person getting convicted with 3 witnesses under this standard is 1 in 8,000.

In reality, witnesses are probably more than 95% accurate with material facts, especially when these are collected in isolation at different times, probably by different police officers.

And if we're being honest with ourselves, a lot more than 1 out of 5 people on trial are guilty of what they're being charged with. The bar for a DA to bring charges is very high, their entire careers are based on conviction rate.

Eye-witness evidence: so unreliable it's an active insult that people gesture towards it as one of the pinnacle forms of evidence.

Reminds me of the Norm Macdonald bit where he says he would not convict someone based on DNA evidence. The punch line is something like "I'm not a scientist, what do I know about DNA?"

Five (or fifty-five) people giving unambiguous eyewitness testimony that clearly identified the defendant and the crime he committed, with them all keeping their stories consistent under hostile cross-examination has exactly zero forensic evidence... but if you, as a juror, found all of that persuasive, it sounds like it should be enough to convict.

Individuals don’t require exoneration in court.

The prosecution, regardless of unethical grandstanding, have a duty to prove the case without any resaonable doubt. They hold the burden of proof.

I would, of course, agree with them as physical evidence isn’t necessarily a requirement to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt. But I would certainly draw my own inference from their mendacity if they used those words.

Your duty as a juror is to make a determination of fact and apply the law as guided by the judge to reach a verdict. When the prosecutor gives you some blabber approaching instructions, that’s an attempt to influence you.

I mean of course if not 10,000 people could stand in a room, watch someone murder another, and then all 10,000 come and testify exactly who it was and what the jury would not be allowed to convict?

How about one person and a rape accusation from 20 years ago?

That's the purpose of statute of limitations.

Didn't many states eliminate or raise those for large categories of violent crimes? This means that a rape today for example could be prosecuted decades from now

A rape accusation just under the statute of limitations is going to require more than just a single accusation. Obviously physical evidence is impossible but they usually go on any information the victim shared with associates ("she told me he raped her the previous night" or there's an authenticated diary detailing the crime), the closeness of the suspect and victim (they knew eachother and likely were in close proximity), any corroborating witness testimony ("I saw him follow her home that night after the party"), and any character witnesses that may have shared similar experiences ("he was rough in bed and wouldn't take no for an answer"). It's difficult to convict on old crimes like this so a DA is going to be very selective on choosing to prosecute, they aren't going to waste their time if the accusation is paper thin or the victim is unreliable. Of course it's entirely possible everyone involved is lying but again, a careful DA is going to do their research before trying the case.

A suspect is under no obligation to prove their innocence but when it comes to circumstantial witness testimony, the suspect absolutely must do everything they can to fight the narrative.

If 10000 people witnessed a crime for which there was no physical evidence present, yeah I'd say something is very suspicious and would not convict.

If 10,000 people witnessed someone pushing someone off a rooftop, you wouldn't convict that person?

> If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.

same reason they are really out to disqualify jurors who know about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification

I mean...yeah?

If someone commits a crime and ten people in the room say they were also in the room and that person did it, that shouldn't get thrown out because the suspect didn't leave a fingerprint.

I think he’s saying that if the 10 people witnessed a murder via gunshot that it would be mighty suspicious if the state didn’t bother to bring any forensic evidence of the shooting to court and instead relied solely on those eyewitness testimonies. At some point the absence of forensic evidence might look more like a deliberate attempt to keep exculpatory evidence out of reach of the defendant than a good faith attempt to prosecute.

Perhaps, but that coin has two sides. A lot of people have watched a ton of crime shows and that warps their sense of what "reasonable doubt" is.

This just means that you can't insist someone is innocent despite overwhelming evidence just because they didn't leave any forensic evidence behind which is completely reasonable.

I'm surprised they'd even need to say that, let alone people who heard it were just learning it. I would imagine the overwhelming majority of cases don't involve forensic evidence. I've only had close involvement in a handful of cases that resulted in a conviction, but none involved forensic evidence. In one they took fingerprints (and the handle to our cash drawer, which they never returned), but that didn't result in a conviction.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The expectation of evidence makes its absence significant, but not definitive.

There's no indication that this guy had to hire a lawyer or actually do anything. The same location data that put him near the scene/time of the crime would also absolve him. I guess it's sad that he felt the need to pay for a lawyer.

Google told him that he would have to go to court to block the release of his identifying data to the police. He was not told what the request was about. At that time, he could only guess that it was related to the break in that happened near his home almost a year ago.

A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect.

He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.

Wouldn't the police have just looked at his location data and see that he lived nearby and rode his bike by often, and that he never stopped at the house?

The absolutely should have, but they didn't bother. They didn't even need to go back to review his history to figure out his patterns of activity. At the day of the crime he never stopped at the house and was in continuous motion.

I've been just leaving my phone at home lately. I recommend it.

Source for this? As I recall, his phone was off when he committed the murders. In fact, they used the evidence that it had been turned off just for the duration of the murders (with some padding) against him.

If you're going to commit a crime, don't suddenly turn off your phone if you don't have a history of doing so!

Or just leave it at home on your bedside table where you ought to be sleeping instead of out killing.

I have on at least two occasions forgotten my phone in my car at highly inconvenient times... One of which was just before a flight, for a vacation. I was amazed it had any battery life at all when I got back.

Yes, this stuff does happen to real people doing normal things.

Sure, but that pattern isn't going to make the cops think you committed a crime. And if you flew out, there's plenty of other evidence you're elsewhere (airline information, credit card usage, etc).

To clarify, I'm not saying they used it against him in court (he didn't even have a trial). It did help in increasing their confidence in him as a suspect.

Hopeful they used the MAC address to find the phone, then tracked the phone itself, because an IMEI and ICCID are pretty difficult to clone, but a Bluetooth MAC address is trivially easy.

The police already had the suspect in mind. They were just building supporting evidence. It was an airtight case. He ended up pleading guilty because otherwise Idaho would have executed him.

> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery

Yes, everyone knows to steal a phone from someone you hate and bring that to the robbery. Right?

I mean, yeah, I wouldn’t even bring my phone to a legal protest. Or, I’d at least shut it down.

It is a little confusing, they ruled that the search was not legitimate, but this didn’t end up helping the defendant? I’m definitely missing an important nuance here but I’m not sure what it is…

The judge doesn't care if the law was violated in collecting evidence.

Maybe this particular judge didn't for whatever reasoning, but judges definitely prevent a prosecutor from introducing evidence based on how it was collected. This is why concepts like "fruit of poisonous tree" and "parallel construction" exist.

Doesn't parallel construcction mean that judges actually don't care how evidence was collected? They can't possibly care that much if they are fine with a fig leaf like parallel construction.

Parallel construction means the judge doesn't know.

Or can at least plausibly pretend not to.

I guess that is true, although you'd be hard pressed to prove that. I don't think any court would hear a complaint about a lower court or adjacent court having participated willingly in parallel construction.

No.

Parallel construction means they have an illegal bugging device in the courthouse bathroom, and use a conversation that you have with your attorney to identify a witness. Then they independently arrest the witness for something and pressure them to testify.

Basically... yeah.

It's using illegally obtained evidence (like an NSA wiretap) to point the detectives in the right direction they would have otherwise never probabilistic-ly searched.

I had a judge once tell me that the police absolutely have the right to commit crimes to gather evidence in an investigation.

(mostly true -- for instance an officer can generally commit innumerable felonies as long as nothing they do violates your personal constitutional rights -- rarely is evidence thrown out because it was obtained in violation of a statute unless that statute includes a provision for exclusion, e.g. wiretapping laws)

The individual who would prosecute them also needs to work with them to prosecute civilians. So pretty much, so long as it isn't murder.

Exactly this.

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

I think they left it to the lower court to decide if the search was legitimate in particular. They ruled in general that geo-fence warrants are not OK. Not a lawyer though!

They ruled that this kind of search, going forward, is illegal. But this wasn’t clear at the time of the investigation, and the cops did what they genuinely thought was best practices for respecting the 4th amendment. So evidence in this case (and prior cases) is ok, but not in the future.

> [E]ven if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.

How is this even remotely a possibility?

It just means they were completely transparent with the court when getting the data, and believed themselves it was lawful.

What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.

In retrospect, the part I quoted is very unclear for what I intended. I should have added more.

What's hard to believe is the data is apparently still allowed in the case. Like... how?

Because the police got a warrant, exactly as this decision now says was required.

And there's something called the "good-faith exception" for unreasonable warrants: If you get a warrant where it's required (or in this case, where the government tried to argue it wasn't!), and a magistrate grants that warrant, it's a legal warrant so long as all participants were acting in good faith, believing their actions to be legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.

This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.

So, all you need is a magistrate that rubber stamps every warrant and it removes all protections from search and seizure from anyone?

Would that not, by definition, preclude the argument that the warrant was obtained in good faith?

Rubber-stamping every warrant without regard for Constitutional and other legal standards would not be operating in good faith.

Apparently, the legal understanding is that the Fourth Amendment doesn't guarantee some right that illegally obtained evidence can't be used against you (it merely guarantees that those obtaining the evidence illegally will be punished).

The reason why evidence obtained illegally is generally suppressed is to act as a deterrent to the Government. Even if individual officers were willing to risk their own punishment for illegal search or seizure (say, maybe they believe they are acting for the greater good), the evidence will generally be suppressed so that there is no rational gain from these illegal actions.

However, if the officers who obtained the evidence illegally were acting under good faith, then there is no deterrence obtained from suppressing the evidence they obtained. They did not act to illegally obtain evidence, in a way that they might be deterred from doing again if the evidence is suppressed - they thought they were collecting the evidence legally so they would do this again. So, in this case, there is no point in suppressing the evidence - no one is harmed by it being admitted (because, again, the Fourth Amendment doesn't promise you that illegally obtained evidence would not be used against you, it just promises that the Government will do all it can to avoid illegal search and seizure).

That interpretation is insane to me. If all it takes is, "haha, oops," to use evidence gained from an unconstitutional search, people do not actually have Fourth Amendment rights.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, knowing that civil asset forfeiture is a thing.

This is mostly true.

You have to remember that evidence exclusion for a constitutional violation is a modern thing, and it is what's known as "judge made," e.g. it wasn't made by legislature, it was invented by the courts. (Miranda warnings are the same -- I remember one time-travel book I was reading where the guy went back to 19th century New York and was complaining about the police beating him and not reading him his rights)

So sometimes it can be kinda hand-wavy and bullshit, especially using the "good faith" exception which has been very over-used in the last decade or so, especially because of new technologies, which gives a get-out clause to the police unless the exact fact pattern of their "search" exactly matched some previous case that was solidified in appellate case law in their state or federal district, or by SCOTUS.

> ...and it is what's known as "judge made," e.g. it wasn't made by legislature, it was invented by the courts.

In fairness, this describes so much of US law, and is why you can't really understand much of the rules that apply to you without also understanding all of the cases in which those rules were applied in novel ways.

Is it good that things work like that here? I don't think so, but I haven't thought through all of the particulars of another system.

“Haha oops” isn’t good faith. You’re making a false equivalence here.

You have to consider the fact that it's really weird for everyone to know that evidence against you exists, but be forced to pretend it doesn't and hide it from the jury. It's not at all self-evident that this is the only, or the best possible, remedy against the government abusively collecting this evidence from you. Ultimately it's very important for the good functioning of society that guilty parties are appropriately punished and innocent parties are exonerated, and disregarding evidence can harm both goals. It's of course also important that the government doesn't seize your property or violate your privacy without a reasonable cause, but this doesn't necessarily conflict with the primary goal of justice.

Also, the good faith exception is supposed to be relatively weak - it's supposed, at least originally, to only apply in cases where the officers performing the illegal action had no reasonable way of knowing that it is illegal; the original case is quite clear - a search was conducted in one state based on an out-of-state warrant, and that warrant itself was later deemed to have been improperly issued. I find it quite reasonable to say that the officers conducting the search had no reasonable way of knowing that this warrant was problematic. If the good faith doctrine was watered down so much that an "oops, I didn't know I was breaking the law" from an officer is enough, then the problem lies with these standards, not with the principle.

I guess I am a 4A absolutist.

The original case is clear that that person's rights were violated. It certainly is reasonable for the officers to believe they could conduct a search in that case, so they should not have consequences. (Officers that do unreasonably violate rights should experience consequences, they currently don't.) But there's nothing in there curing the violation of rights.

It's so weird to me that this is possible. If that happened with other rights, it'd feel like, "oh, yeah, definitely these soldiers shouldn't have been allowed to live here. They do now, though, and will continue to. Sorry."

If the cops believe hard enough anything is legal.

"Sorry we broke the law, but its ok this one time because it would be detrimental to the case".

I mean... slippery slope? Just because they were sincere about it doesnt make it magically ok to use the illegal evidence.

Well, it potentially does make it “ok” in the sense of being less bad than letting the guy off. That’s why the legal concept exists. There are other contexts where there is no good faith exception, but in this situation there is one.

In this case the crime is a bank robbery which isn’t victimless but most people think of as somewhat “victim-lite”. If the crime was the stranger rape of a little girl then the vast majority of people would have been outraged if the police had not obtained this warrant.

Because there are way too many existing precedents where "acting in good faith" was sufficient to overcome the Fruit of the poison tree doctrine.

This court doesn’t care about precedent.

From what I've been able to research on the good faith exception, it's not in the Constitution but the Supreme Court first outlined this exception in the landmark 1984 case United States v. Leon .

“Had acted in good faith”

Seems like there’s no point in having the constitution if a violation of it has no effect.

The effect is going to be on the issuance or not of new warrants going forward in this domain.

The police could not have foreseen this ruling. It was not previously known that such warrants were unconstitutional. Now we know. Now judges are not to issue such warrants.

>Now judges are not to issue such warrants.

But if they do, the warrants' harvest of evidence will still not be poisoned, because good faith?

There is no good faith protection once the case law is set.

But why does that never work the same why for the individual that does a (supposed) crime?

Aww look at that hangdog expression. They earned a treat. Go on, have some unconstitutional evidence.

I always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified.

- FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails

- They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels

- They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels

- Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...

This is also a great example of map resection.

It's also a good demonstration how probable cause is supposed to work.

In this case, the subpoena probably looked something like "this email must have been sent by one of your guests, so give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy".

Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.

> give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy

An entire guest list is still a broader fishing expedition than should normally be permitted. Warrants should be much more targeted than that. (Of course, many companies seem happy to give overly broad information without even requiring a warrant...)

A guest list on a single day seems pretty fine grained if you looking for someone who was there on that day.

Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.

You have the IP address and the time. For many hotels, that'd give you a specific room number and guest.

With IPv4 there's zero chance of that. At most, you could get all the people who were using [Gmail] around that time. With IPv6, mayyybe, but that assumes the hotel does as much data collection as possible and does it correctly.

Assuming the hotel had customer specific login info and the person you are looking for was using it, sure.

The IP address on hand is probably the hotel's public address used for NAT, especially in 2012. This means you'd need to have full NAT logs + source port + something like a captive portal setup that forces the user to identify the room to be able to tie (externalIp, sourcePort) to (user, room). The captive portal type isn't unheard of for hotels, even in 2012, but the NAT logs... it's no surprise they had to ask for the room list.

In this case it was a warrant, and the Supreme Court’s ruling does not hold that the warrant violated the fourth amendment.

Edit: looks like I misunderstood what you were referring to by “this case”

> Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.

In the case before SCOTUS, there was a witness who mentioned seeing the suspect in a particular area and that they were on their phone. So it's not a large inferential leap to say that call records would lead to evidence of who the witness saw in this particular case.

That said, Minnesota has an even broader right, so even this sort of warrant might not pass muster in states like that.

When news broke about the affair, I remembered, 6 months prior, watching an episode of the Daily Show where Jon Stewart interviewed Paula Broadwell and they even made jokes about if her husband was jealous of her spending so much time interviewing David Petraeus.

https://archive.org/details/COM_20120127_020000_The_Daily_Sh...

You missed mentioning the title of her book about General Patraeus: "All In."

That's an ironic biography name second only to the one about Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach later convicted of child sexual abuse: "Touched".

The whole Petraeus affair[1] is a wiki 'telenovela'. The only things missing are references to Corintian leather. I will share gossip tomorrow, even if old news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal

obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Similarly, for the people who don't see the big deal about geo-data, consider that knowing (A) where a phone "goes to work" and (B) where it "sleeps" is usually enough to uniquely identify a person, even when there's a large degree of inaccuracy in the coordinates.

Almost nobody who works near my office lives in my apartment complex, and vice-versa.

The sheer tradecraft necessary for privacy and anonymity these days is so absurd. One would need to do things like somehow buying burner phones untraceably, removing the battery when not in use and only ever turning them on in a specific location that's completely unlinked from one's normal everyday activity, and only use the phone for one specific purpose in order to prevent identity cross contamination. The depths of compartmentalization necessary for this stuff almost seems to require that the person develop a split personality.

> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.

Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.

Fantastic. One step closer to making holding personal data a liability.

How do you jump to that conclusion? theGoog decided they didn't want to deal with it because it was a hassle not because it was a liability issue. Congress critters would need to get together to make data hoarding a liability and I just don't see that ever happening

A hassle is a liability. Not, like, a legal liability but definitely a financial one.

The more we make it inconvenient and expensive for companies to hoard this data, the more they will learn it’s not worth it. A lot of the time data is collected “just in case” or for features nobody uses. Companies will learn the hard way that this is a liability to their bottom line and operations, and give it up.

> Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.

...I smell a "backdoor" that's in the shape of the "Locate my device" and similar such systems. Unless there's no Android subsystem that will dredge up and present info about where a phone has been, then this demand seems totally plausible:

"We know that you can cause a device to report its historical location information. Cause all of the devices that were within area X between times T and G to report their positions during that time to us, the police. Here's our warrant."

The implications are far reaching beyond cell phones. any service that stores location data for it's user is subject to 4th amendment expectations _regardless_ of an opt-in. The court specifically rejected the argument that by opting-in the user is abrogating their privacy rights. If you centrally store location data you have an obligation to protect that data under the 4th amendment as private and would require a warrant.

The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.

Don't forget that beyond exposing your right to privacy from the government, this info is basically a sitting duck for bad actors outside of government, too. I wonder if these companies would be held accountable if the privacy stealing was from the other end. Probably not.

The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.

It's commonly forgotten that the bill of rights simply restricts the government. For nearly 100 years it didn't even apply to state governments but just the federal government.

More context for those not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...

If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place, does this mean that products like Flock which indiscriminately violate your privacy would now require a warrant for law enforcement to access (currently they do not)?

> If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place

I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.

What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?

If I run into someone at the grocery store, I can remember "oh I saw them yesterday" if the Police interview me. If I start writing down/logging every time I saw that person at the grocery store and plotting it out, I would consider that "crossing the line".

A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.

What if the grocery store has a security camera pointed at the door that records 24/7? Should they not be allowed to do that?

I think they should be allowed to point it at places inside their store, with prominent disclosure to people entering.

I don't think they should be allowed to point it at the public sidewalk.

So what if they mount inside pointing outside?

Was "I don't think they should be allowed to" ambiguous?

If I see something weird going on outside my house, should I be allowed to take a picture of it?

If I decide to take a picture of what's going on outside my house for no reason at all, should that also be allowed?

if I decide to put a camera in my living room pointed out the window and record, should that be allowed?

If I decide to run a business out of my home, does that change anything?

Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.

Some things that are not much of a problem at a small scale ("take a picture of a specific strange thing you see happening", "record one license plate of a specific car in relation to an incident") can become a problem at scale ("set up a video camera to constantly surveil the sidewalk and do facial recognition on it", "record every license plate that goes by and correlate your recordings with a million other people to generate a tracking map").

The problem is with pervasive surveillance, not discrete observation, and that's the spirit that laws about surveillance should attempt to uphold.

> Observation: it is legal to listen to a conversation happening in public, and it is not typically legal to record it.

That doesn't seem accurate. Do you have an example of a law that prohibits filming on public property? Isn't the legality the whole premise of what those weirdo "first amendment auditors" on YouTube do?

Depends on your local law, but in many, many places you cannot legally record a conversation you aren't a party to, even in public. In the US, in many states, it's not permitted to record a conversation you are a party to if others have not consented. There are various reasonable exceptions that permit recordings (e.g. public events, press conferences, trials, governmental meetings, recording interactions with police). "Conversation between two people happening in public" is not typically a permitted exception for recording.

Note that in this comment I'm talking about audio recording, which typically has much stricter regulations than video recording. I think the same principles should apply to video, and in some jurisdictions they do. But in my comment, I was using the laws around audio recordings vs physical eavesdropping to make an analogy about the problem of pervasive surveillance.

Afaik two party consent rules don't apply in public settings

Again, it depends heavily on the jurisdiction, as well as various other factors.

Try walking around a grocery store with your phone and take a picture of every person you pass. See how they react.

That's the expectation people have for privacy.

Reminds me of the "Surveillance Camera Man" project[1] from a while back, where a guy went around silently filming people in public. People didn't like it and some responded aggressively, even though those same people probably thought nothing of the numerous actual surveillance cameras pointing at them all the time.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46302860

There's a whole category of video content called "First Amendment Audits" where people film with big cameras in public and farm people random, and often quite hostile, reactions.

> Should they not be allowed to do that?

If that camera system is closed-circuit and its data is restricted to the premises they should be permitted to do that.

If the data from that camera system [0] can be removed from the premises by anything less than a search warrant or court order, then no, they should not be permitted to do that.

I know this isn't how the relevant laws work now, but they haven't been adequately updated to account for radical changes in the ability for companies to perform mass surveillance.

[0] ...whether raw or "processed" by -say- a "customer analytics" software... [1]

[1] Want a count of the day's customers? Check register receipts. Want to know what displays are most popular? Ask your employees, or employ someone to take notes. etc, etc, etc.

I would like to visit the park without several large cameras staring me down at every junction now.

I would like to go to various establishments, or maybe even political meetups, without being profiled by insurance agents and law enforcement officers. Especially now that it seems simply attending a political meeting could land me decades in prison.

I would, as the US Supreme Court just reaffirmed is my right, not like to have my location continuously tracked immediately upon leaving my home via such a camera network. Otherwise this entire ruling is just subverted by adding a few extra steps.

> I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.

- United states v Jones

- Carpenter v United States

- florida v jardines

- kyllo v united states

All affirm some level of expectation of privacy in public.

ALPR's, facial recognition, drone surveillance are going to get challenged at some point. GORSUCH in this opinion pontificated on Katz v United States. Highly recommend reading his opinion

Would you be happy with a public "petcat tracker" site that published your personal location and image 24/7 whenever you are out in public, from data collected from Flock and other similar products? If you think that would cross a line, you do have some expectation of privacy even in a public place.

Right: This kind of law is supposed to conform to the common expectation, not dictate it!

We all might expect someone could take a photo of us walking down the sidewalk, but that's not the same as "expecting" to be followed by a virtual (or even literal) drone-swarm that constantly catalogues our every movement cross-referenced to potential interactions with everyone else.

I do. It's not the legal norm in the US, but in many countries you are still considered to have a right of privacy when you are outside your home. In Japan, for example, you can be sued for publishing photographs or video of street scenes without either securing permission or redacting the faces of passers-by.

> but in many countries

Which countries?

Japan, for example.

You can easily look up which other countries strictly enforce personality rights in public spaces and see for yourself, I'm not here to service you.

You're suggesting people can look through your briefcase, purse, backpack without a warrant in a public place.

> What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?

I believe my papers and effects should NOT be subject to unreasonable searches.

The cases covered under the 4A:

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"persons", "papers" and "effects"; just because I am in public does not give the police carte blanche to search me.

We do have semiprivate places in public, for example bathrooms, based on an expectation of privacy. There is no reason that expectation cannot be changed or extended in ways.

Where does the ruling discuss public places? The article quotes the ruling as saying, “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location.” I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.

> I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.

Even when the surveillance is being conducted by a private entity? A private entity that's selling access to its private records of the comings and goings of a sizeable chunk of the population to police who are buying specifically because it would be a 4th Amendment violation for them to collect the data themselves?

If it's reasonable for we consumers, who know that cell networks and phone makers are collecting our data, to expect privacy, then it's reasonable to extend that same expectation to operators of ALPR and related techs. There's no opt-out, after all. We can't reject the terms of service.

I suspect the argument against that would be that you contract with the cell service provider and so have a colorable interest as a party to said contract. In contrast you have no such contractual relationship with Flock, and if your government contracted with them on your behalf your remedy is to vote harder.

According to the ruling, the exposure of your location history is the automatic price of conventional cell-phone usage—which, just as Carpenter noted, is a "pervasive and insistent part of daily life."

If we can't step out of our houses or drive to the doctor without that fact getting placed into a searchable database, then I'd argue that it qualifies as a "pervasive and insistent part of daily life."

You are missing the point. It's not that Flock cameras are not intrusive (they are, I fully agree) but that your contract with the cell service company gives you some legal standing to claim you were injured. If your municipality erects flock cameras and you don't like them, you don't have standing in the same way because a) you are not a customer of flock with contractual rights that can be enforced, and b) elected officials are legally authroized to do things because they won political office via election. So unless you discover they were bribed by Flock or engaged in some other corrupt activity, you don't have the legal standing to complain about a policy outcome you dislike.

This guy works for flock

Of course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.

She's not as big on some of the broader interpretations of the 4th amendment that more civil liberty minded justices would lend credence to.

Particularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.

I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.

She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.

When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.

Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.

Genuinely curious:

What does it mean for a Chief Justice to be in control of their court, and of course, for them to be out of control?

So very specifically I've historically read Roberts as a fairly moderate jurist. He has a true romanticism about the neutrality of the court and that it shouldn't be a political body. (This is ridiculous, but anyways.) This has changed as the court has reached a 6/3 bias. When the court was a 5/4, Roberts could swing to the center and bring the majority position with him. But now the far right wing doesn't need his help: The conservative wing can do a 5/4 even with his dissent. So you see Roberts bucking the conservative trend much less, maybe not because he agrees with the court but knows he can't push the outcome to the center.

The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.

The CJ decides who writes the opinion of the majority if in the majority, and the dissent if in the dissent. Its the job of the CJ to bring sides together in clear oppositions, and "horse trade" between bits and pieces of a decision so that its clear where a majority/minority lie.

The CJ's foremost political role is to ensure the judicial branch of government is seen as a politically legitimate institution which wields its power against the other branches in a constitutionally and poltiically legitimate way. If that slips, congress can start hiring/firing; and the executive, in the end, controls the guns -- they can be arrested.

To avoid being arrested or fired, the court has to keep all sides believing the rules they set are fair.

They have no power, in the end, but the power they are allowed to have. They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away

> They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away

That is entirely not at all what the us constitution says

Yes but the Constitution has to actually be followed for it to work. The Supreme Court has no military or police, if the President chooses to disobey them and the military and police follow the President's orders... there isn't much the Court can do about it. The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening right now.

> The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening

You are entirely right, we really need to prosecute presidents who do not follow SCOTUS rulings, like [1] and [2]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/joe-biden-student-debt-forgivene...

[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/obama-administration-ignores-supre...

I mean, this is the textbook definition of whataboutism. =)

But I am indeed of the inclination that we should demand the rule of law from Presidents of all parties. Generally speaking, I am in favor of a significant downsizing of the authority of the President as a whole. They have far too many powers and are granted too much leniency to use them "in case of emergency" which has increasingly just turned into every President declaring everything they want to do an emergency. Presidents should be subject to prosecution for misconduct, and upheld to the highest standards of the law, and we should have systems in place to swiftly and effectively remove them if they do not meet them. The bar for impeachment and removal is too high when it is unattainable in a two-party system where the President controls one of those parties.

Our country does not need kings of any party.

We are in violent agreement

I'll refer you to article 50 of the constitution of the USSR,

> Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.

https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/Russian/const/77cons02....

---

which is to say, "constitutions" as pieces of paper, do not matter. A constitution isnt a document, its literally, how power is constituted by the people.

Paper has no magical power to bring about anything in the world.

One day, decades or centuries or millenia from now -- there will be no USA SC: at one point they will have been arrested, or killed, or retired and not replaced. At once point democracy in the US will fail, and the US will fail, and something else will replace it. Sic transit gloria mundi. So it goes. History goes on.

The world isnt a program, words are not its code. History goes along because power as insittuitionalised by groups of apes, comes and goes.

In the case of the legislative branch, the Constitution actually says pretty much exactly that. See Exceptions Clause of Article III, Section 2

The court is legitimate by every measure, regardless it it matches your political views. Starting the contrary is honestly extremism.

It's extreme to expect them disclose "donations"?

Calling part of the government illegitimate is a very slippery slope to justifying trying to overthrow said government. You can say they are corrupt, you can disagree with policies, but saying illegitimate is cause for extreme responses.

I'm sorry but no legitimate court would hide the majority of their income. Those aren't actions of an institution we should place this amount of power into.

Do you always judge the validity of a statement according to the implications of it being true, or do you get to do it just this once as a treat? Further, how does saying a court is "corrupt" not call for "extreme measures" but referring to it as "illegitimate" does? What's the meaningful difference?

Calling members of a court corrupt, means you can pursue legal action against them, write laws, impeach, etc. calling the court itself illegitimate, implies the government that put them into power is illegitimate. Calling government illegitimate is the first move of revolutionary groups.

2-3 corrupt members of a 9-member court is pretty bad for the legitimacy of said court.

I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince

Iirc, they do a straw poll avter oral arguments to see what the majority is and most senior assigns. The writing is generally spread equally across justices over a term. It is a workload thing

As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.

With the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.

> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job.

They have repeatedly reduced Congressional powers, including today, where they basically said Congress can't setup genuinely independent agencies (in Slaughter). Or when they kneecapped the VRA.

Some of them likely subscribe privately to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory.

Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.

> Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.

The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.

It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.

Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.

Statutes don't supersede the constitution and passing one doesn't create that power.

> Statutes don't supersede the constitution…

"We can make rules the President has to follow" does not supersede the Constitution.

In this case, it did, that's why SCOTUS ruled against it.

SCOTUS does not enjoy papal infallibility. They fuck up.

(Or act maliciously, as when Alito invented the new "history and tradition" test.)

Congress fucks up as well. There's as pretty strong argument that "independence" from the executive power vested in the POTUS and legislative branch puts that power in a place not authorized anywhere in the constitution, and for good reason, as the design of the constitution intends elected office to have direct control over powers of congress and the executive.

Yeah, that's why we have the veto power; as a check on their power.

SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes. "Those rules we agreed to, signed into law, and followed for the last 90 years? HAHA PSYCHE SUCKERS!"

Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.

It obviously depends on what rules they make. They can't make a rule creating a body of government employees that decide the substance of rules (not just implementation details), and then also has armed officers to enforce those rules, with its own judges to have hearings specific to those rules. Whether you heard ice or atf when you read that, they both fit. I like Gorsuch's opinion. He clearly calls out this danger of a half step of saying the president has complete control of the executive without also ruling the agencies themselves are unconstitutional. Realistically though instantly removing all those agencies would mean chaos. The court can't rule how to fix something, only that the rock brought before them is the wrong rock. The telling bit would be if someone then brings them a case where the removal of the ftc leadership has resulted in the agency not enforcing the laws as written. If they then side with the congress I would give them the benefit of my doubt. But I do also feel like their positions, while correct, are correct only out of the context of their environment.

> It obviously depends on what rules they make.

Today, the Court ruled that Congress can make the Federal Reserve an independent agency, but not the FTC. Same day, same justice!

What are the rules, exactly?

I see and acknowledge your point. But going back to

>Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.

Congress ceded FTC to the executive branch. Congress put the Federal Reserve in some magical land, outside the executive branch, that doesn't even make sense.

My theory was that SCOTUS ruled the executive had this power over the agencies executive branch. Seems SCOTUS doesn't want to touch federal reserve question with a 10 foot pole. But going back to my original theory, it is a slightly different framing, since everyone involved freely agrees FTC is an executive agency while the federal reserve does not enjoy this agreement.

I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed since you're not starting with the assumption the agency in question is an executive agency. SCOTUS seems to have ruled that an agency in the executive branch has executive control, while not going so far as to determine that the federal reserve is in the executive branch which is an entirely different question.

It's important to note SCOTUS is too chickenshit to rule on anything but in the most narrow way possible. If you ask them to rule on something with a prior established fact that it's in the executive branch you're likely going to get a very narrow ruling that doesn't try to create a unifying theory of everything.

> I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed.

I think it's the core question; are there really rules at all?

The two rulings make that answer clear, I think.

Roberts in Cook says that firing was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". How is the FTC's setup in this regard not part of the same tradition? What part of the Constitution permits the Fed's existence outside of any of the branches? Why can Congress establish a central bank outside the Executive entirely, but not regulate the FTC?

Slaughter says POTUS can fire commissioners in the executive branch. Cook says Trump isn't King and can only directly fire people actually in the executive branch and Trump wasn't able to prove the federal reserve was situated there.

Prove the federal reserve is in the executive branch, and that the ruling of Cook presumed it was, and then you have a point.

I fail to see the inconsistancy.

> can't setup genuinely independent agencies

The US constitution lays out three AND ONLY three branches of government. The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment. If they create an agency in the executive branch, by definition it reports to the head of the executive.

> The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment.

Sure. So explain the results of Trump v. Cook, which involve exactly that.

The same justice, on the same day, issued one opinion that says Congress can't put limits on firing FTC chairs, and another that Congress can put limits on firing Fed board members.

Did you read the opinion? SCOTUS only said a process was broken by a step being missed. Trump can still fire Cook, just has to let Cook have a hearing about it. Nowhere that I see did they say Trump must at all consider what Cook says at said hearing or be bound by it in any way - only that she must be able to get a hearing. This does not seem to contradict his authority to fire her. Just like your job's HR will gladly give you a hearing about terminating you, even if their minds are all made up and nothing you say will change a thing.

Yes, I read both opinions, and am left wondering why "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference" applied to one and not the other.

SCOTUS ruled if something is in the executive branch, POTUS can fire the commissioner. Congress and everyone else explicitly is saying the FTC is in the executive branch, which puts it in a completely different question that regarding the federal reserve.

The ruling in Slaughter was not that president can fire commissioners no matter what branch they are in. It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal reserve lies in the executive branch.

Your attempt here to falsely portray an inconsistency that doesn't exist. It's a different question as to whether the federal reserve is in the executive branch. You'll have to show the federal reserve is in the executive branch if you want the same ruling to apply or claim this inconsistency.

> It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal reserve lies in the executive branch.

But that's insane, right?

"You can make an agency the President has no control over, but you can't make one the President has some control over."

If you ask me personally, I think the federal reserve as a non-executive non-congressional agency is insane, yes. But as a legal question I would hope the president has to establish the control he's exerting is actually in the executive branch before he tries to exercise constitutional powers of the executive branch that supersede contradictive law.

It would be pretty nuts if the president could just fire whomever he wants no matter what branch they are in based on a simple declaration he considers them to be in the executive branch.

I agree in general, but this is also why I say allowing authoritarianism through technicality. They know by punting to Congress, a body that is completely paralyzed, what the practical outcome of that ruling is.

I agree that motive is likely in at least one justice. But at the same time, if they really wanted to get back to original principles, they would have to take a wrecking ball to virtually every agency without being able to provide any substitute for the load bearing bits. I think these artificially narrow rulings are what some of the justices think is the middle ground to work in that direction without bringing the roof down. Thomas in particular has advocated for simply taking out the walls and trusting congress and the states will somehow fix everything and it isn't their problem. I think his opinions have occasionally been horribly flawed, but I see his vision and get what he is hoping for. I suspect something like that is the only way a representative democracy could recur in the US. Right now, states with strong geographic bents towards authoritarianism can use power of the federal executive to strengthen their position. If the federal executive had no agencies and was powerless the way Thomas suggests, those states wouldn't have much impact. But that entails acknowledging the entirety of the federal bureaucracy is unconstitutional and creating all sorts of power vacuums. Who knows how that would turn out? I increasingly think it couldn't be worse than the likely end state of a federal autocracy if we don't.

One of Alito's main points appears to be that a search is not really a search, as long as it's laundered through a third party. Scary that this was 6-3

I'm not too surprised because it's this court. I'm happy we can take the win for privacy rights.

We are very lucky we got this outcome out of this, because at least on its face the warrant was pretty well-behaved: They didn't get any identifying information until they had aggressively narrowed suspects. If someone had a convenient CCTV camera where the call was placed it all would have been moot. It's very possible if this geofence plan had only identified one person, the guilty party, it would be very hard to argue it was unreasonably broad as well. And as Alito did point out, this ruling won't actually get the thief out of his case.

We got a win today where a win certainly wasn't expected.

It's such a little thing but while reading the opinion I see that the court (Kagan in this case?) makes a factual claim it provides SOURCES.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

"Modern cell phones, we observed a dozen years ago, are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S. 373, 385 (2014). Since then, the percentage of Americans who own smartphones has only increased. To- day, more than nine in ten Americans own a smartphone. See W. Bishop, Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (Nov. 20, 2025) (91%); compare A. Smith, Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013) (56%)."

Tbh it feels quite performative, giving an air of rigor to the what often feels like post hoc reasoning and selective application of precidence and case law...

Most SCOTUS opinions are rigorously sourced. They’re usually also well argued. The recent spate being an exception, in particular anything written by Alito.

They're rigorously sourced in that some set of underpaid clerks is tasked with surfacing their best guess as to what material is most relevant to the court, with optional fact checking competing for their time.

https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-...

So the sources exist, but whether they're quality is another question.

The surprising bit is that 10% of Americans DO NOT own a smartphone. That must be exceedingly difficult. Increasingly everyday activities require them, without fallbacks. I presume those numbers exclude children, and then if you account for the infirm, it wouldn't surprise me if we started to get to universal levels of ownership.

It's people over 65. Cell phone ownership is pretty much universal, but only 78% of people 65+ own a smartphone. I don't think that's really surprising at all. I wouldn't expect an 80 year old to adopt a smartphone when their cognition, fine motor control, and/or vision is going. And who needs one in a nursing home? I bet if they broke it down further you'd find that the non-ownership skews towards people who were already elderly ~15 years ago.

PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

What is often overloked is how much location data leaks through photo metadata alone. Every photo taken with a phone contains GPS coordinates, timestamps, and device info in the EXIF data. People share photos publicly without realizing they are broadcasting their exact location history. At least with geofence warrants there is a legal process, with photo metadata it is just frely available to anyone who checks.

Most (all?) services people use to share their images strip the metadata. You’re not going to find exif data on WhatsApp, instagram, Snapchat etc

You can also revoke Location permissions from your Camera app. I've done this.

https://i.postimg.cc/LRd1KbPf/scrot-20260630-085733.png

So surveillance tech works. That isn't a question, it is a statement. In a perfect world only bad people would have it applied to them. The issue is that it is too easy now. When wire tapping became a thing it was a physical thing that had time and effort costs. Abuse of it was capped by capability to do it and that bar made it, to me, a reasonable compromise that a judge would need to issue a warrant and that the police would need to expend real, finite, resources to execute it. Without boundaries any surveillance tech is to dangerous to have. Maybe we need quotas? You can only request and monitor x# of people a month where x is a small number related to population size. We need to find ways to limit overreach of technology capabilities. I am glad this was decided this way but I really want a more concrete tool that limits all technologies like this.

What if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?

That is the loop hole IMO and that's how they will get around it.

This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.

In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone.

Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.

For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:

- identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks

- disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria

- determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers

- identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers

In fairness, I mean, if the people collecting the data sell it on the open market, then you can't realistically expect it to be private.

The only solution in that case is to make it illegal to sell the data. And that's never gonna happen in the US.

Any warrant must be extremely specific and limit the scope as far as possible.

Warrants 99% of the time are rubber stamped and issued for either something non-existent or very flimsy evidence and needs to be stopped in its tracks.

good. Of course the precise language of the ruling matters, but good.

> Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.

If he had not opted in to that, only the NSA and intelligence-industrial complex would have had access to his Google location history, while with that option, regular police had enough political clout to demand it. They might lose that ability (although even that is not entirely clear), but the under-the-table mass surveillance of everybody will continue just like before.

Obviously there should be limits but what should they be?

I actually don’t think asking for phone ids for 30min before and after an event within a limited distance IS overly broad. The fact it only returned 19 initial IDs kind of shows that no?

Equally, knowing someone has been in or near a bank is not particularly intrusive. It’s not like searching who visited a lawyers office or a sexual health clinic etc.

So would a 5 min window have been ok? Or a 10minute window?

When does a warrant become “sprawling”?

> Obviously there should be limits but what should they be?

A warrant made by a neutral court; that is specifically narrow enough to only target people who could be reasonable suspects.

I'm having trouble understanding what the court did rule on, because IMO this is a totally reasonable use of data. It was very limited in scope, both in time and location.

There are actual cases of false murder accusations occurring simply because the wrongly accused person simply happened to be within X number of meters of the crime scene. They simply walked past the wrong place at the wrong time with their phone.

This is partly why I use GrapheneOS.

IANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?

It’s raising the bar for doing these searches. Essentially saying some government investigator can’t go “oh well if we had this data we might find something interesting, so let’s get the data.” The court here is saying these geofenced searches smell a lot like such a fishing expedition hoping to find something interesting.

Rather you should have evidence that a specific person did a specific thing and need to conduct a search to find additional evidence of said person doing said thing.

The 4th amendment protects US persons from the government just doing generalized searches in hopes that it will turn up useful info. You have a right to privacy from the government unless the government can clear a high bar showing probable cause that you’ve done something wrong.

Google Maps switched from storing location history in the cloud to storing it on your phone for "better privacy," so the geofencing warrant used in this case wouldn't work anymore.

However, other apps might record location history in the cloud, so there might be an impact there?

It's mostly punting on the issue. They determined that it was a "search" under the 4th amendment but made no ruling on whether or not it was "reasonable". It's back to lower courts to decide on that.

Y'all celebrating this like a win, but it's just rubber stamp of dragnets with a few extra steps. Supreme Court could have ruled that geofencing itself was unconstitutional. They did not. Instead:

>In this case, she said, Chatrie and the government have disputed – and the court of appeals did not decide – whether the geofence warrant provided the kind of “‘particularized information’ … based on ‘probable cause to believe that Google had information’ that would help solve a crime.” Therefore, the court sent the case back to the lower court for it to make that determination.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...

They didn't rule on it because it is out of scope of the matter before the court. The lower courts first have to make a ruling that can be appealed.

From the ruling:

> The conclusion that a Fourth Amendment search occurred does not resolve this case, because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only searches that are “unreasonable.” When law enforcement officials undertake a search to discover evidence of a crime, the reasonableness standard generally requires that they seek a warrant from “a neutral and detached magistrate,” Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14, who may issue a warrant only when “probable cause is properly established and the scope of the authorized search is set out with particularity,” Kentucky v. King, 563 U. S. 452, 459. The warrant issued here, as described earlier, was an uncommon, multi-step one, and the parties have contested the legality of each stage of the search process it authorized. The Fourth Circuit did not address the questions that unusual warrant raises. Because this is “a court of review, not of first view,” Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U. S. 709, 718, n. 7, the Court leaves it up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause

Right. And there is no chance that the court will side with the liberals when that actually happens.

Excellent, I wonder how this might impact things like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712

It will offer this company and those similar to it the ability to increase shareholder value by selling amalgamated information to law enforcement.

Google, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.

In case you were wondering

This ruling was unusually bipartisan because some justices didn’t like that they were hearing a case at all that shouldn’t affect the case at all.

"armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty."

I will never understand how some people look at this stuff and immediately think that what we need is more EHLO doubly encrypted VPNs with DNS over HTTPS and paid with crypto5.0

Finish your point?

They think that because governments have a nasty history of killing tens of millions of their own people and need to be restrained.

Does the US have such a history?

This is an interesting configuration of justices

rare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.

Yes, this is the same argument used when the Biden admin during covid pressured the media companies to cancel people and news they did not like for "misinformation" instead of calling it censorship. This and LEOs buying data from Big Corp is just end-running the 1st and 4th amendments which is ultimately fascism.

It’s again legal for the US government to publish propaganda targeted against their citizens,

so you’ll struggle to ever know for sure what’s unadulterated US media.

The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites. They were taken to court over both, and they prevailed on the former and lost on the latter: the administration (any administration) is permitted to ask a site for a correction, and it is then truly at the site's discretion. They are not permitted to pressure them.

"Permitted" is doing a lot of work there.

> The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites.

Like the definitely known and uncontested factual information on the origin of the virus?

you are factually correct but realistically the office of the president cannot ask for anything without pressure, by nature of being the office of the president

Birthright citizenship decision coming tomorrow.

Yep. And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues. Feels like there's about to be some pure bullshit spewing from the right flank of this illegitimate court. I'd dearly love to be wrong about this, but I'm not holding out hope. Until alito and thomas are impeached for unconstitutional rulings and bribery, there's nothing worth hoping for.

There's a 94% chance the EO is struck down on polymarket.

And what are the odds in Vegas? How is the opinion of a bunch of gamblers on polymarket relevant?

Because Polymarket is full of corrupt folks with insider information. Trump Jr. Is a senior advisor to Polymarket. Iran admitted they would observe Polymarket bets during the height of the war to see when they were next likely to get bombed.

Presumably the justices (or their clerks) have told their friends how they're going to rule, and their friends have told their friends, and that's made the market. Or that's supposed to be the value prop of Polymarket.

There's precedent. Roberts was so angry that someone leaked the Dobbs decision that he spearheaded the investigation that found that nobody would admit to leaking and there's nothing they can do.

People are maximally incentivized to be right because of the monetary risk and reward.

A 94% odds indicates an extremely high likelihood that something is going to happen. It's relevant because it's a different, additional perspective than whatever a news article says.

It's a 2500℅ ROI if it's not struck down, so I would encourage you to bet if you think the outcome will be no.

It's disturbing that the statistic you cite does give me hope (if true). But if I had an account, I'd still put $50 against it. I'm cynical enough to at least entertain the possibility that these corrupt dickheads have let the market get that lopsided as a way to cash in on top of their odious ruling (by way of bribes after they make other people richer).

And your $50 would be gone.

I think it'll be upheld.

> And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues.

Care to cite some examples?

In my experience, the "big" cases, that the media has been talking about are all decided to be big after the fact. There are a multitude of cases that everyone is anticipating being big but they are ruled the "right" way and the outrage isn't there.

It seems like everyone has swallowed the partisanship of the SCOTUS hook line and sinker but that's just not how they operate. Almost all of the "conservative" members of the court were appointed almost exclusively on their opinions of Roe v Wade and the "conservative" part of a conservative justice doesn't mean Republican it's a reference to their judicial philosophy. Plus, most of them were appointed at a time where Republicans (and Democrats) had very different political positions and the positions of the Justices don't change with the weather of the parties because of the lifetime appointments.

At this point I'm not sure which members of the various outrage factories actually believe the court works that way or are just throwing out red meat for their readers.

[0]https://apnews.com/live/birthright-citizenship-decision-supr...

No, I'm not going to cite you examples. The hypocrisy is evident in the Arkansas voting rights flip flop from last session to this one. The chevron ruling is as Republican as it gets. I don't care anything about your rationalizations and I'm not here to debate the minutia of the most destructive bench in my lifetime. Roe v Wade was not an abortion issue, it was a fourth amendment issue and they absolutely botched it. Sell your bullshit elsewhere.

Very relieved to admit I was wrong about this verdict and even happier I didn't put money on it, but it doesn't undo the damage they have already done and I don't have any tolerance for faux centrism that equivocates about the pure nonsense being legitimized by our current judicial slate.

Both Chevron and Roe could be fixed by very simple legislation and should have been in the first place.

You seem a lot more concerned with the outcome of the decisions rather than if they were correct.

IMHO a more important ruling "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner and overturns major restraint on presidential power":

> More broadly, Monday’s decision was a major victory for proponents of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers.

* https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724538

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory

AIUI, independent agencies created by Congress are no longer independent.

This is not the topic of this post, why not submit this separately?

PR stunt. They already have raw access to everything anyway.

Great... now do flock cameras, license plate trackers, basically everything in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48369980

Reply on news.ycombinator.com