16 ms·

California Court of Appeal finds geofence warrant unconstitutional

194 points by miles 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago
Dear country, we voted that guy out of the LASD and also introduced the ability to sack the Sheriff before an election Yep, we literally never had any method of accountability of the LASD and this guy finally took that to an extreme Hope the new guy Luna is keeping up
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Whats the matter with this post, to people browsing these comments and not finding it useful The article is about the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department doing unconstitutional things under prior unaccountable leadership, getting only partially curbed by the court, and the post is about other checks and balances created in the wake of this lack of checks and balances
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
tothrowaway 4y ago
> Ultimately, the court’s CalECPA analysis proved fatal to the defendants’ case. Despite ruling the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, the court refused to suppress the evidence, finding the officers acted in good faith based on a facially valid warrant. Incredible. This is like the government version of a corporation laundering its bad behavior through an undercapitalized shell company to shield it from liability.
- seandrawling 4y ago
  Humans of normalized biological features exhibit similar states of logic and behavior. It’s almost as if the language of “politician” and “business leader” create a fake world of hallucination and it’s all just meat popsicles jockeying for economic clout.
- paws 3y ago
  I'm not knowledgeable about CalECPA, but I sure don't see why officers who 'acted in good faith' should be a basis for violating the peoples' 4th amendment rights.
  - snark42 3y ago
    It's the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, you can thank the Supreme Court.
perihelions 4y ago
Found something interesting not mentioned in the article: apparently, police ransacked six innocent peoples' Google data, in the process of getting to the two guilty ones. - "Google produced a list of eight anonymized accounts that had been at two or more of the six locations at the relevant time periods. Of the eight accounts, one had been at four of the geofence locations, one at three locations and the remaining six had been at two locations. Haas requested, and Google produced, identification information for all eight accounts. Two of those accounts (the ones that had been at three and four of the locations) ultimately led authorities to Meza and Meneses." The court document doesn't elaborate on what happened to those six people (were they even informed of the search, after the fact?) Maybe they don't care. From the judicial perspective, there is no such thing as a constitutional privacy right. The Fourth Amendment, for example, protects more narrowly against search in the context of criminal prosecution: no prosecution, no rights violation.
- kadoban 4y ago
  > The Fourth Amendment, for example, protects more narrowly against search in the context of criminal prosecution: no prosecution, no rights violation. How can that be true, since the 4th amendment doesn't include any word or phrase referring to a prosecution?
  - perihelions 4y ago
    Neither does it have any specific language for remedies. The courts created a remedy for Fourth Amendment violations in the context of prosecution (exclusion of evidence), but not for the general case.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    The Constitution puts limits on what the government can do, but if the government does those things anyway, there's no automatic penalty. You as an individual could ask a court to order the government to stop or otherwise undo the harm, but if you weren't harmed as a result of that unconstitutional act, or if you were harmed but there's nothing the court could do about it, then you don't have standing to ask the court to do anything. It's something of a bug in the way America works. If cops conducting a search of your home disconnect all of your security cameras during the search, that's probably unconstitutional, but you can't prove that it harmed you, and being illegal isn't the same thing as being a crime, so it's just an unconstitutional thing that happened, and that's where the story ends.
dudus 4y ago
Does this sound like something written by gpt-3 ?
mikece 3y ago
A geofence warrant is essentially a dragnet warrant: is there any precedent for that being legal in the US?
mistrial9 3y ago
actually I posted here on YNews last year about San Diego-based company that was creating "fence" zones for emergency response with a geo-web site to coordinate them. Second an anecdote where a California Highway Patrol fire response officer was shown abruptly and dismissively telling the mayor of a small town that the restrictions on access "could last a year." That YNews post was met with multiple "so what" and "they make money" kinds of responses, without any apparent alarm at the technology creep. Perhaps you have heard of a "ratchet" effect, where one law plus one technology plus later, one more law, creates a non-reversible and serious change to the social contract for law enforcement?
- vegetablepotpie 3y ago
  I have not heard of the “ratchet effect”. Some research on ddg showed me the Collingridge dilemma, but that’s different because it’s about regulation of technology and not law enforcement adoption of tech. Can you point to an example?
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    lacking something specific to point to, I will hand-wave by saying that there are at least three different framework "lenses" to add context to these changes.. perhaps one is the "evolutionary spiral" technology-optimist view, like Kevin Kelly at WIRED; two is the "social stability" thinking apparently in that Collinridge book and others; third is the one I refer to, which is brute force politics and law over time.. probably a crude reference to that is "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene or some historical writing..

194 points by miles 4y ago

Dear country, we voted that guy out of the LASD and also introduced the ability to sack the Sheriff before an election Yep, we literally never had any method of accountability of the LASD and this guy finally took that to an extreme Hope the new guy Luna is keeping up

yieldcrv 3y ago
Whats the matter with this post, to people browsing these comments and not finding it useful The article is about the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department doing unconstitutional things under prior unaccountable leadership, getting only partially curbed by the court, and the post is about other checks and balances created in the wake of this lack of checks and balances
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

tothrowaway 4y ago

> Ultimately, the court’s CalECPA analysis proved fatal to the defendants’ case. Despite ruling the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, the court refused to suppress the evidence, finding the officers acted in good faith based on a facially valid warrant. Incredible. This is like the government version of a corporation laundering its bad behavior through an undercapitalized shell company to shield it from liability.

seandrawling 4y ago
Humans of normalized biological features exhibit similar states of logic and behavior. It’s almost as if the language of “politician” and “business leader” create a fake world of hallucination and it’s all just meat popsicles jockeying for economic clout.
paws 3y ago
I'm not knowledgeable about CalECPA, but I sure don't see why officers who 'acted in good faith' should be a basis for violating the peoples' 4th amendment rights.
- snark42 3y ago
  It's the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, you can thank the Supreme Court.

perihelions 4y ago

Found something interesting not mentioned in the article: apparently, police ransacked six innocent peoples' Google data, in the process of getting to the two guilty ones. - "Google produced a list of eight anonymized accounts that had been at two or more of the six locations at the relevant time periods. Of the eight accounts, one had been at four of the geofence locations, one at three locations and the remaining six had been at two locations. Haas requested, and Google produced, identification information for all eight accounts. Two of those accounts (the ones that had been at three and four of the locations) ultimately led authorities to Meza and Meneses." The court document doesn't elaborate on what happened to those six people (were they even informed of the search, after the fact?) Maybe they don't care. From the judicial perspective, there is no such thing as a constitutional privacy right. The Fourth Amendment, for example, protects more narrowly against search in the context of criminal prosecution: no prosecution, no rights violation.

kadoban 4y ago
> The Fourth Amendment, for example, protects more narrowly against search in the context of criminal prosecution: no prosecution, no rights violation. How can that be true, since the 4th amendment doesn't include any word or phrase referring to a prosecution?
- perihelions 4y ago
  Neither does it have any specific language for remedies. The courts created a remedy for Fourth Amendment violations in the context of prosecution (exclusion of evidence), but not for the general case.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  The Constitution puts limits on what the government can do, but if the government does those things anyway, there's no automatic penalty. You as an individual could ask a court to order the government to stop or otherwise undo the harm, but if you weren't harmed as a result of that unconstitutional act, or if you were harmed but there's nothing the court could do about it, then you don't have standing to ask the court to do anything. It's something of a bug in the way America works. If cops conducting a search of your home disconnect all of your security cameras during the search, that's probably unconstitutional, but you can't prove that it harmed you, and being illegal isn't the same thing as being a crime, so it's just an unconstitutional thing that happened, and that's where the story ends.

dudus 4y ago

Does this sound like something written by gpt-3 ?

mikece 3y ago

A geofence warrant is essentially a dragnet warrant: is there any precedent for that being legal in the US?

mistrial9 3y ago

actually I posted here on YNews last year about San Diego-based company that was creating "fence" zones for emergency response with a geo-web site to coordinate them. Second an anecdote where a California Highway Patrol fire response officer was shown abruptly and dismissively telling the mayor of a small town that the restrictions on access "could last a year." That YNews post was met with multiple "so what" and "they make money" kinds of responses, without any apparent alarm at the technology creep. Perhaps you have heard of a "ratchet" effect, where one law plus one technology plus later, one more law, creates a non-reversible and serious change to the social contract for law enforcement?

vegetablepotpie 3y ago
I have not heard of the “ratchet effect”. Some research on ddg showed me the Collingridge dilemma, but that’s different because it’s about regulation of technology and not law enforcement adoption of tech. Can you point to an example?
- mistrial9 3y ago
  lacking something specific to point to, I will hand-wave by saying that there are at least three different framework "lenses" to add context to these changes.. perhaps one is the "evolutionary spiral" technology-optimist view, like Kevin Kelly at WIRED; two is the "social stability" thinking apparently in that Collinridge book and others; third is the one I refer to, which is brute force politics and law over time.. probably a crude reference to that is "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene or some historical writing..