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Federal court rules geofence warrants are unconstitutional:
In another round of increasingly rare good news in the realm of privacy, individual rights and freedom, two separate US federal judges have found geofence warrants to be unconstitutional.
Geofence warrants have been around for some time now. Essentially, it's a new investigative technique wherein law enforcement, rather than surveilling a suspect to discover if they had been at the scene of a crime, they work backwards by identifying everyone that's been at a particular location and surveilling them until they discover which one of them is a possible suspect.
[...] US courts have recently begun accepting that our smartphones hold so much data about us that they should be protected by the fourth amendment, as an extension of our homes.
Three separate unsealed opinions from two federal magistrate judges have come to the same conclusion: that these warrants lack the probable cause and particularity requirements of the fourth amendment.
[...] It's disturbing to think of just how many Americans' constitutional rights would have been violated if the warrant was granted. Even more disturbing is other such warrants possibly getting granted regularly, aside from what information Google willingly hands over to governments.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by legont on Thursday September 03 2020, @12:57PM (1 child)
One may ask how police officers, prosecutors and judges can sleep well after that? Simple as well. A bad guy is typically taken for a suspect. They say to themselves that perhaps he did not raped this particular girl, but he sure raped some other one. With this simple approach we'll put behind bars all of them one way or another.
This is also the reason why most members of this group were not in this situation. We are relatively low on the bad guys list.
The only strategy for a random guy is to stay low on the list. It is called to behave. Whites understand this. Blacks don't want to. This explains the difference in incarceration rates.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @03:02PM
Here is a good article [archive.org] that explains why race isn't a factor in whether an individual chooses to abide by the law. You should probably reconsider your position on this.