Posted on 06/22/2018 7:42:59 AM PDT by DCBryan1
The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of digital privacy.
In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices decided that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for trials. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Sixth Circuit court's decision.
Carpenter v. United States is the first case about phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov. 29.
The dispute dates back to a 2011 robbery in Detroit, after which police gathered months of phone location data from Timothy Carpenter's phone provider. They pulled together 12,898 different locations from Carpenter, over 127 days
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Especially FISA warrants.................
You don’t maintain your medical records either, but...
Incredible. Only 1 vote from saying law enforcement does NOT need a warrant to search your phone. While I’m appreciative of the ruling the vote count is troubling.
Exactly.
The process of obtaining warrants may sound rigorous and protective of our rights, but that’s just to appease the public and personal rights advocates. The reality is they are easy to get.
Remember, the state is ALWAYS more important than you are. /sarc
Does it really matter what the law is? We know law enforcement at the highest level scoffs at the law. So, if they wanna do it, they’ll just do it.
That logic means my medical records dont belong to me either.
Constitutional, limited government conservatism is lost in this argument as is the argument for secure borders.
How did they know his location?
If this were an exigent circumstance situation, I could probably understand the conservatives’ position. But warrants are exceedingly easy to get, many times at any hour of the day or night. I know, we’ve gotten them in the dead of night before as a law enforcement officer.
If you’ve ever read HIPAA, that’s almost exactly what it says. It’s cloaked in a lot of lawyer talk, but it practically says they can disclose to whomever they want. It’s harder for you to gain access to your records than any entity your doctor, insurer, or employer does business with.
The four Liberal Justices would repudiate the “third-party doctrine”, while the four other Conservative Justices would apply it without exception. Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t want to keep the doctrine, but wants it to be limited. We don’t know how limited he wants it to be, just that today he felt the third-party doctrine went to far.
It looks that way here
Im with the tards on this one
There was a somewhat similar case before the court within the last year or so. In that case, the question involved the application of Fourth Amendment protections to a rented car. The Supreme Court decided that the police did NOT need a warrant to search the car in that case. However, there was also another angle in that the person driving the car was not the person who rented it ... and the police had every reason to believe it had been stolen.
I disagree. In this case, Gorsuch is defaulting to the terms of a contract first and foremost.
It is strange indeed.
That would effectively destroy the Fourth Amendment. In today's age, it is not realistic to expect people to not have Internet access or a cell phone. The dissenters' and government's reasoning would allow law enforcement to use your cell phone and Internet access against you. My property should not be used by the government to spy on me. Any reasoning that would effectively nullify the Fourth Amendment should be rejected. The Court got it right today.
“Once again, Justice Thomas dissenting opinion is clear and to the point...”
Oh, I agree with Thomas that the records belong to the phone companies. But when he correctly establishes who owns those records he failed to require that law enforcement obtain a warrant before seizing the private property and records of the phone companies.
A warrant is still required because the rights of the phone companies are not diminished simply because they are a company.
The phone companies are willing to give them that information though, if the police were taking it without them wanting to they would have been on the front lines of this debate.
The phone companies are NOT willing. They’re the subject of questionable FISA warrants and even more questionable national security letters.
Now they have grounds to demand actual warrants that don’t come from politically biased secret courts or notoriously biased Deep State operatives.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.