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.
- 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
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:
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.
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.
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
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?
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.
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.
"We can make rules the President has to follow" does not supersede the Constitution.
(Or act maliciously, as when Alito invented the new "history and tradition" test.)
This smells like an urban myth.
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.
Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?
How is this even remotely a possibility?
What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.
carterschonwald•1h ago