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- FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails
- They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels
- They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels
- Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...
https://archive.org/details/COM_20120127_020000_The_Daily_Sh...
In this case, the subpoena probably looked something like "this email must have been sent by one of your guests, so give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy".
Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.
If you read the court’s ruling, the warrant was quite specific and it originally only requested anonymized data from Google.
An entire guest list is still a broader fishing expedition than should normally be permitted. Warrants should be much more targeted than that. (Of course, many companies seem happy to give overly broad information without even requiring a warrant...)
Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petraeus_scandal
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:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
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.
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?
If you're going to commit a crime, don't suddenly turn off your phone if you don't have a history of doing so!
Yes, everyone knows to steal a phone from someone you hate and bring that to the robbery. 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.
What's hard to believe is the data is apparently still allowed in the case. Like... how?
Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
The more we make it inconvenient and expensive for companies to hoard this data, the more they will learn it’s not worth it. A lot of the time data is collected “just in case” or for features nobody uses. Companies will learn the hard way that this is a liability to their bottom line and operations, and give it up.
Even when the surveillance is being conducted by a private entity? A private entity that's selling access to its private records of the comings and goings of a sizeable chunk of the population to police who are buying specifically because it would be a 4th Amendment violation for them to collect the data themselves?
If it's reasonable for we consumers, who know that cell networks and phone makers are collecting our data, to expect privacy, then it's reasonable to extend that same expectation to operators of ALPR and related techs. There's no opt-out, after all. We can't reject the terms of service.
I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.
What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?
- United states v Jones
- Carpenter v United States
- florida v jardines
- kyllo v united states
All affirm some level of expectation of privacy in public.
ALPR's, facial recognition, drone surveillance are going to get challenged at some point. GORSUCH in this opinion pontificated on Katz v United States. Highly recommend reading his opinion
A Flock camera that receives BOLO's for known-criminals and immediately flags captures in real-time is different than tracking every person going everywhere with a history.
I would like to go to various establishments, or maybe even political meetups, without being profiled by insurance agents and law enforcement officers. Especially now that it seems simply attending a political meeting could land me decades in prison.
I would, as the US Supreme Court just reaffirmed is my right, not like to have my location continuously tracked immediately upon leaving my home via such a camera network. Otherwise this entire ruling is just subverted by adding a few extra steps.
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.
However, other apps might record location history in the cloud, so there might be an impact there?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712
I will never understand how some people look at this stuff and immediately think that what we need is more EHLO doubly encrypted VPNs with DNS over HTTPS and paid with crypto5.0
If he had not opted in to that, only the NSA and intelligence-industrial complex would have had access to his Google location history, while with that option, regular police had enough political clout to demand it. They might lose that ability (although even that is not entirely clear), but the under-the-table mass surveillance of everybody will continue just like before.
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
The only solution in that case is to make it illegal to sell the data. And that's never gonna happen in the US.