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Police search areas around crimes, people known to be in those locations (log books, identifications on surveillance), and warrants against locations searching

• Dylan16807 8y ago
  They don't typically search those areas retroactively. And there is a qualitative and scary difference between a few cops walking around versus processing every single person that drives by on a major road for tens of hours.
• freeflight 8y ago
  > Police search areas around crimes That is true, but these areas usually do not involve the private homes of people. Police can ask to look around, but if the owner of the home declines, then police have to come back with a search warrant and afaik that warrant needs to be specific to that property. This is the digital equivalent of that but applied on a whole geographical area, basically a "digital bulk search warrant". Because I doubt these warrants will surface to the judge how many people will be affected, in a very invasive way. When you factor in much of our modern lives are saved on servers of Google or Apple, then this is actually a much worse invasion of privacy than just having a couple of unis take a quick look through your home physically. This is the equivalent of them sitting down in front of your phone/computer and being able to spend hours upon hours on browsing through your private data.