Supremes Issue a Ruling FOR Privacy

In a 6-3 ruling the court said that if law enforcement needs to find out who was in a particular geographical area at a particular time, they need to ask a judge for a piece of paper.

A geofence warrant is a piece a paper asking a company like Google or Verizon for information on every single person who happened to be near some event so they could try and figure out who the crook was. In this case, it was a bank robbery and they were hoping that the robber was stupid enough to bring a cell phone with him that was not a burner and was turned on in the area and around the time of the robbery. So anyone who happened to be in the vicinity of the robbery was now a suspect and the cops want to be able to consider if you are a crook.

The problem is that the fourth amendment tries to restrict UNREASONABLE searches based on King George’s “General Warrants” around the time the Constitution was written. A general warrant allowed the King’s men to enter a place and look any where for any thing whether it was related to the reason they came of not. Geofence warrants are scarily similar to that.

The cops complain that in order to get a warrant they have to convince a judge that this is the least invasive way to find the bad guy. It is not and it is not even effective if the bad guy turns off his phone. And, if there is someone in the area that the cops have a beef with – not that this ever happens, that person now has to prove that he is not “guilty until proved innocent”. Not great, so the Supremes said no.

One small win for privacy. Credit: Tech Crunch

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