5 ms·

This NPR article was incredibly light on details. Here's the full record: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf https://www.supremecourt.g

by fein 8y ago

This NPR article was incredibly light on details. Here's the full record: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf

jcranmer 8y ago
The full record is a 120-page decision, including 4 separate dissenting opinions, that came out less than an hour ago. Do you really expect a full digestion of the opinion in that time frame?
- fein 8y ago
  I'd expect a bit more from a news company that makes the claims on journalistic prowess NPR does, like a brief summary on what grounds the judges wrote their dissents. Took me all of 5 minutes to ctrl+f through the doc and find each record. To save you some time, the issue seemed to be that the individual does not create, maintain, or store the records in question, so the 4th amendment does not apply in this instance.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    NPR's standard of understanding before putting it in the article is likely a little higher than having a reporter skim and a Ctrl+F, especially in the era of "fake news" accusations.
    - jessriedel 8y ago
      If you actually have a writer who is already familiar with the legal aspects of the case, you can put out insightful analysis very quickly (cf. SCOTUSblog). Instead, we live in a world where the NPR journalist (Nina Totenberg) has just about every legal journalism award you can receive but doesn't have a law degree and is most famous for legal soap-opera material (e.g., revealing which supreme court justice had smoked marijuana). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg The reason there's no analysis here is because there isn't a market for it.
      - ceejayoz 8y ago
        The "legal soap-opera material" demonstrated his background check had missed something, and wound up in the nominee withdrawing his nomination. Single-handedly torpedoing a SCOTUS nomination seems like pretty meaningful reporting. Expecting journalists to have second degrees in law isn't a reasonable standard, if for no other reason than the financial burden it'd inflict on an already fairly low paid profession. (Hell, many lawyers struggle with their law school loans.) Chances are she's cultivated plenty of legal minds to help with analysis - perhaps even one or more of the justices themselves.
        toadworrier 8y ago
        > Expecting journalists to have second degrees in law isn't a reasonable standard Who said anything about a second degree?
        jessriedel 8y ago
        You misinterpret. First, the point isn't that marijuana use isn't important, the point is that this class of reporting is orthogonal to legal analysis. It would be as if the most famous professional football players were fantastic comedians but never played ball in college. Second, a law degree is a reasonable (albeit imperfect) standard if legal analysis is desired; that it would be hard for journalists to obtain this just tells us there's no market in it. (That is, people with legal training are not rewarded.) Law degrees are also super expensive to obtain for people who just want to do legal aid, but such lawyers need the training nonetheless because they actually have to understand the law to do their job. Legal journalists do not.
    - jrochkind1 8y ago
      Quite right, which is exactly why the article was just a brief summary, not including anything that didn't meet their standards, right?
  - CJKinni 8y ago
    As a reformed law student, I can say that I've seen a lot of smart people try to answer questions about long legal opinions after a few minutes of ctrl+f-ing through a case. 90% of the time it worked well enough for them to stumble through a question. The other ten percent, they ended up making silly mistakes, like quoting from a multi-page hypothetical argument that lead the student to completely misinterpret the opinion. It's easy enough to misunderstand a nuance of a legal argument when you read opinions, asking someone to guarantee their correct about a summation of 120 pages of text within 5 minutes, or even an hour, seems unrealistic. News organizations like NPR like to be accurate when being accurate will only take a few hours of work. And I'd rather they be correct than fast.
shadowfacts 8y ago
The key line: > We decline to extend Smith and Miller to cover these novel circumstances. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user's claim to Fourth Amendment protection. The unique nature being: > when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance Also see this great thread that looks at the decision: https://twitter.com/elizabeth_joh/status/1010166193473417216 https://twitter.com/elizabeth_joh/status/1010166193473417216
ethbro 8y ago
In the majority opinion, even though it specifically notes its decision is narrow to this case, the requirement of a warrant is based on a more general test. 1) Does the individual have a reasonable and historically legal expectation of privacy over the information in question? (In this case, detailed location data and yes) 2) If the information is stored with a third party, does the user "affirmatively" turn over that information, or is it collected with or without their knowledge? (In this case, cell location data is the latter) 3) Is the data "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" (this from Jones)? 4) Cell phones are "'such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life' that carrying one is indispensable to participation in modern society". This seems like a pretty positive expansion of digital privacy rights re: government searches. Specifically, cementing the Jones decision about pervasiveness and ease-of-dragnetting being a factor is good law. As the reasoning is fairly clear and straightforward, one would hope the court would follow for similar devices (e.g. car GPS data or voice assistants).
jessriedel 8y ago
As always, the coverage from SCOTUSblog is vastly better. They only have a 4-paragraph post on the decision, but it is much more info-dense than anything else: http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-holds-that-police-will-generally-need-a-warrant-for-cellphone-location-information/ http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-hol... Further write-ups by them will come out as people have time to read the decision. You can also look at the 15 previous SCOTUSblog posts about this case before the decision was released which dissect the relevant issues: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/carpenter-v-united-states-2/ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/carpenter-v-unite...

by fein 8y ago

This NPR article was incredibly light on details. Here's the full record: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf

jcranmer 8y ago

The full record is a 120-page decision, including 4 separate dissenting opinions, that came out less than an hour ago. Do you really expect a full digestion of the opinion in that time frame?

fein 8y ago
I'd expect a bit more from a news company that makes the claims on journalistic prowess NPR does, like a brief summary on what grounds the judges wrote their dissents. Took me all of 5 minutes to ctrl+f through the doc and find each record. To save you some time, the issue seemed to be that the individual does not create, maintain, or store the records in question, so the 4th amendment does not apply in this instance.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  NPR's standard of understanding before putting it in the article is likely a little higher than having a reporter skim and a Ctrl+F, especially in the era of "fake news" accusations.
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    If you actually have a writer who is already familiar with the legal aspects of the case, you can put out insightful analysis very quickly (cf. SCOTUSblog). Instead, we live in a world where the NPR journalist (Nina Totenberg) has just about every legal journalism award you can receive but doesn't have a law degree and is most famous for legal soap-opera material (e.g., revealing which supreme court justice had smoked marijuana). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Totenberg The reason there's no analysis here is because there isn't a market for it.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      The "legal soap-opera material" demonstrated his background check had missed something, and wound up in the nominee withdrawing his nomination. Single-handedly torpedoing a SCOTUS nomination seems like pretty meaningful reporting. Expecting journalists to have second degrees in law isn't a reasonable standard, if for no other reason than the financial burden it'd inflict on an already fairly low paid profession. (Hell, many lawyers struggle with their law school loans.) Chances are she's cultivated plenty of legal minds to help with analysis - perhaps even one or more of the justices themselves.
      - toadworrier 8y ago
        > Expecting journalists to have second degrees in law isn't a reasonable standard Who said anything about a second degree?
      - jessriedel 8y ago
        You misinterpret. First, the point isn't that marijuana use isn't important, the point is that this class of reporting is orthogonal to legal analysis. It would be as if the most famous professional football players were fantastic comedians but never played ball in college. Second, a law degree is a reasonable (albeit imperfect) standard if legal analysis is desired; that it would be hard for journalists to obtain this just tells us there's no market in it. (That is, people with legal training are not rewarded.) Law degrees are also super expensive to obtain for people who just want to do legal aid, but such lawyers need the training nonetheless because they actually have to understand the law to do their job. Legal journalists do not.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Quite right, which is exactly why the article was just a brief summary, not including anything that didn't meet their standards, right?
- CJKinni 8y ago
  As a reformed law student, I can say that I've seen a lot of smart people try to answer questions about long legal opinions after a few minutes of ctrl+f-ing through a case. 90% of the time it worked well enough for them to stumble through a question. The other ten percent, they ended up making silly mistakes, like quoting from a multi-page hypothetical argument that lead the student to completely misinterpret the opinion. It's easy enough to misunderstand a nuance of a legal argument when you read opinions, asking someone to guarantee their correct about a summation of 120 pages of text within 5 minutes, or even an hour, seems unrealistic. News organizations like NPR like to be accurate when being accurate will only take a few hours of work. And I'd rather they be correct than fast.

shadowfacts 8y ago

The key line: > We decline to extend Smith and Miller to cover these novel circumstances. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user's claim to Fourth Amendment protection. The unique nature being: > when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance Also see this great thread that looks at the decision: https://twitter.com/elizabeth_joh/status/1010166193473417216 https://twitter.com/elizabeth_joh/status/1010166193473417216

ethbro 8y ago

In the majority opinion, even though it specifically notes its decision is narrow to this case, the requirement of a warrant is based on a more general test. 1) Does the individual have a reasonable and historically legal expectation of privacy over the information in question? (In this case, detailed location data and yes) 2) If the information is stored with a third party, does the user "affirmatively" turn over that information, or is it collected with or without their knowledge? (In this case, cell location data is the latter) 3) Is the data "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled" (this from Jones)? 4) Cell phones are "'such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life' that carrying one is indispensable to participation in modern society". This seems like a pretty positive expansion of digital privacy rights re: government searches. Specifically, cementing the Jones decision about pervasiveness and ease-of-dragnetting being a factor is good law. As the reasoning is fairly clear and straightforward, one would hope the court would follow for similar devices (e.g. car GPS data or voice assistants).

jessriedel 8y ago

As always, the coverage from SCOTUSblog is vastly better. They only have a 4-paragraph post on the decision, but it is much more info-dense than anything else: http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-holds-that-police-will-generally-need-a-warrant-for-cellphone-location-information/ http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-hol... Further write-ups by them will come out as people have time to read the decision. You can also look at the 15 previous SCOTUSblog posts about this case before the decision was released which dissect the relevant issues: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/carpenter-v-united-states-2/ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/carpenter-v-unite...