It will offer this company and those similar to it the ability to increase shareholder value by selling amalgamated information to law enforcement.
Cider9986 · 2026-06-29 17:44:50 UTC
Google, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.
Hnrobert42 · 2026-06-29 16:45:54 UTC
Of course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.
DetroitThrow · 2026-06-29 16:49:49 UTC
She's not as big on some of the broader interpretations of the 4th amendment that more civil liberty minded justices would lend credence to.
thewebguyd · 2026-06-29 17:07:07 UTC
Particularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.
TimorousBestie · 2026-06-29 17:13:52 UTC
I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
twoodfin · 2026-06-29 17:16:06 UTC
She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.
ocdtrekkie · 2026-06-29 17:17:46 UTC
When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
wyldberry · 2026-06-29 17:37:39 UTC
Genuinely curious:
What does it mean for a Chief Justice to be in control of their court, and of course, for them to be out of control?
ocdtrekkie · 2026-06-29 17:47:36 UTC
So very specifically I've historically read Roberts as a fairly moderate jurist. He has a true romanticism about the neutrality of the court and that it shouldn't be a political body. (This is ridiculous, but anyways.) This has changed as the court has reached a 6/3 bias. When the court was a 5/4, Roberts could swing to the center and bring the majority position with him. But now the far right wing doesn't need his help: The conservative wing can do a 5/4 even with his dissent. So you see Roberts bucking the conservative trend much less, maybe not because he agrees with the court but knows he can't push the outcome to the center.
The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.
mjburgess · 2026-06-29 18:26:16 UTC
The CJ decides who writes the opinion of the majority if in the majority, and the dissent if in the dissent. Its the job of the CJ to bring sides together in clear oppositions, and "horse trade" between bits and pieces of a decision so that its clear where a majority/minority lie.
The CJ's foremost political role is to ensure the judicial branch of government is seen as a politically legitimate institution which wields its power against the other branches in a constitutionally and poltiically legitimate way. If that slips, congress can start hiring/firing; and the executive, in the end, controls the guns -- they can be arrested.
To avoid being arrested or fired, the court has to keep all sides believing the rules they set are fair.
They have no power, in the end, but the power they are allowed to have. They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
dmitrygr · 2026-06-29 19:25:42 UTC
> They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
That is entirely not at all what the us constitution says
ocdtrekkie · 2026-06-29 19:34:42 UTC
Yes but the Constitution has to actually be followed for it to work. The Supreme Court has no military or police, if the President chooses to disobey them and the military and police follow the President's orders... there isn't much the Court can do about it. The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening right now.
dmitrygr · 2026-06-29 19:50:04 UTC
> The system works when everyone executes the system faithfully, but that isn't meaningfully happening
You are entirely right, we really need to prosecute presidents who do not follow SCOTUS rulings, like [1] and [2]
I mean, this is the textbook definition of whataboutism. =)
But I am indeed of the inclination that we should demand the rule of law from Presidents of all parties. Generally speaking, I am in favor of a significant downsizing of the authority of the President as a whole. They have far too many powers and are granted too much leniency to use them "in case of emergency" which has increasingly just turned into every President declaring everything they want to do an emergency. Presidents should be subject to prosecution for misconduct, and upheld to the highest standards of the law, and we should have systems in place to swiftly and effectively remove them if they do not meet them. The bar for impeachment and removal is too high when it is unattainable in a two-party system where the President controls one of those parties.
Our country does not need kings of any party.
dmitrygr · 2026-06-29 20:51:02 UTC
We are in violent agreement
mjburgess · 2026-06-29 20:17:23 UTC
I'll refer you to article 50 of the constitution of the USSR,
> Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.
which is to say, "constitutions" as pieces of paper, do not matter. A constitution isnt a document, its literally, how power is constituted by the people.
Paper has no magical power to bring about anything in the world.
One day, decades or centuries or millenia from now -- there will be no USA SC: at one point they will have been arrested, or killed, or retired and not replaced. At once point democracy in the US will fail, and the US will fail, and something else will replace it. Sic transit gloria mundi. So it goes. History goes on.
The world isnt a program, words are not its code. History goes along because power as insittuitionalised by groups of apes, comes and goes.
rootusrootus · 2026-06-29 21:27:46 UTC
In the case of the legislative branch, the Constitution actually says pretty much exactly that. See Exceptions Clause of Article III, Section 2
ecshafer · 2026-06-29 21:48:16 UTC
The court is legitimate by every measure, regardless it it matches your political views. Starting the contrary is honestly extremism.
sixothree · 2026-06-29 22:46:21 UTC
It's extreme to expect them disclose "donations"?
ecshafer · 2026-06-30 00:15:44 UTC
Calling part of the government illegitimate is a very slippery slope to justifying trying to overthrow said government. You can say they are corrupt, you can disagree with policies, but saying illegitimate is cause for extreme responses.
sixothree · 2026-06-30 05:23:46 UTC
I'm sorry but no legitimate court would hide the majority of their income. Those aren't actions of an institution we should place this amount of power into.
Edman274 · 2026-06-30 14:32:48 UTC
Do you always judge the validity of a statement according to the implications of it being true, or do you get to do it just this once as a treat? Further, how does saying a court is "corrupt" not call for "extreme measures" but referring to it as "illegitimate" does? What's the meaningful difference?
newaccountman2 · 2026-06-29 17:26:01 UTC
I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince
s1artibartfast · 2026-06-30 02:00:27 UTC
Iirc, they do a straw poll avter oral arguments to see what the majority is and most senior assigns. The writing is generally spread equally across justices over a term. It is a workload thing
ocdtrekkie · 2026-06-29 17:16:03 UTC
As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.
galangalalgol · 2026-06-29 17:22:39 UTC
With the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 17:24:25 UTC
> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job.
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.
Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 17:32:26 UTC
> Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.
It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.
Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.
mothballed · 2026-06-29 17:37:28 UTC
Statutes don't supersede the constitution and passing one doesn't create that power.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 17:40:11 UTC
> Statutes don't supersede the constitution…
"We can make rules the President has to follow" does not supersede the Constitution.
mothballed · 2026-06-29 17:40:43 UTC
In this case, it did, that's why SCOTUS ruled against it.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 17:42:24 UTC
SCOTUS does not enjoy papal infallibility. They fuck up.
(Or act maliciously, as when Alito invented the new "history and tradition" test.)
mothballed · 2026-06-29 17:47:10 UTC
Congress fucks up as well. There's as pretty strong argument that "independence" from the executive power vested in the POTUS and legislative branch puts that power in a place not authorized anywhere in the constitution, and for good reason, as the design of the constitution intends elected office to have direct control over powers of congress and the executive.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 17:55:04 UTC
Yeah, that's why we have the veto power; as a check on their power.
SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes. "Those rules we agreed to, signed into law, and followed for the last 90 years? HAHA PSYCHE SUCKERS!"
Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.
galangalalgol · 2026-06-29 18:01:44 UTC
It obviously depends on what rules they make. They can't make a rule creating a body of government employees that decide the substance of rules (not just implementation details), and then also has armed officers to enforce those rules, with its own judges to have hearings specific to those rules. Whether you heard ice or atf when you read that, they both fit. I like Gorsuch's opinion. He clearly calls out this danger of a half step of saying the president has complete control of the executive without also ruling the agencies themselves are unconstitutional. Realistically though instantly removing all those agencies would mean chaos. The court can't rule how to fix something, only that the rock brought before them is the wrong rock. The telling bit would be if someone then brings them a case where the removal of the ftc leadership has resulted in the agency not enforcing the laws as written. If they then side with the congress I would give them the benefit of my doubt. But I do also feel like their positions, while correct, are correct only out of the context of their environment.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 18:03:26 UTC
> It obviously depends on what rules they make.
Today, the Court ruled that Congress can make the Federal Reserve an independent agency, but not the FTC. Same day, same justice!
What are the rules, exactly?
mothballed · 2026-06-29 18:15:36 UTC
I see and acknowledge your point. But going back to
>Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
Congress ceded FTC to the executive branch. Congress put the Federal Reserve in some magical land, outside the executive branch, that doesn't even make sense.
My theory was that SCOTUS ruled the executive had this power over the agencies executive branch. Seems SCOTUS doesn't want to touch federal reserve question with a 10 foot pole. But going back to my original theory, it is a slightly different framing, since everyone involved freely agrees FTC is an executive agency while the federal reserve does not enjoy this agreement.
I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed since you're not starting with the assumption the agency in question is an executive agency. SCOTUS seems to have ruled that an agency in the executive branch has executive control, while not going so far as to determine that the federal reserve is in the executive branch which is an entirely different question.
It's important to note SCOTUS is too chickenshit to rule on anything but in the most narrow way possible. If you ask them to rule on something with a prior established fact that it's in the executive branch you're likely going to get a very narrow ruling that doesn't try to create a unifying theory of everything.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 18:16:47 UTC
> I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed.
I think it's the core question; are there really rules at all?
The two rulings make that answer clear, I think.
Roberts in Cook says that firing was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". How is the FTC's setup in this regard not part of the same tradition? What part of the Constitution permits the Fed's existence outside of any of the branches? Why can Congress establish a central bank outside the Executive entirely, but not regulate the FTC?
mothballed · 2026-06-29 20:44:10 UTC
Slaughter says POTUS can fire commissioners in the executive branch. Cook says Trump isn't King and can only directly fire people actually in the executive branch and Trump wasn't able to prove the federal reserve was situated there.
Prove the federal reserve is in the executive branch, and that the ruling of Cook presumed it was, and then you have a point.
I fail to see the inconsistancy.
dmitrygr · 2026-06-29 19:26:52 UTC
> can't setup genuinely independent agencies
The US constitution lays out three AND ONLY three branches of government. The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment. If they create an agency in the executive branch, by definition it reports to the head of the executive.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 20:01:31 UTC
> The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment.
Sure. So explain the results of Trump v. Cook, which involve exactly that.
The same justice, on the same day, issued one opinion that says Congress can't put limits on firing FTC chairs, and another that Congress can put limits on firing Fed board members.
dmitrygr · 2026-06-29 20:05:32 UTC
Did you read the opinion? SCOTUS only said a process was broken by a step being missed. Trump can still fire Cook, just has to let Cook have a hearing about it. Nowhere that I see did they say Trump must at all consider what Cook says at said hearing or be bound by it in any way - only that she must be able to get a hearing. This does not seem to contradict his authority to fire her. Just like your job's HR will gladly give you a hearing about terminating you, even if their minds are all made up and nothing you say will change a thing.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 20:06:48 UTC
Yes, I read both opinions, and am left wondering why "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference" applied to one and not the other.
mothballed · 2026-06-29 20:30:27 UTC
SCOTUS ruled if something is in the executive branch, POTUS can fire the commissioner. Congress and everyone else explicitly is saying the FTC is in the executive branch, which puts it in a completely different question that regarding the federal reserve.
The ruling in Slaughter was not that president can fire commissioners no matter what branch they are in. It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal reserve lies in the executive branch.
Your attempt here to falsely portray an inconsistency that doesn't exist. It's a different question as to whether the federal reserve is in the executive branch. You'll have to show the federal reserve is in the executive branch if you want the same ruling to apply or claim this inconsistency.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 20:55:12 UTC
> It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal reserve lies in the executive branch.
But that's insane, right?
"You can make an agency the President has no control over, but you can't make one the President has some control over."
mothballed · 2026-06-29 21:05:29 UTC
If you ask me personally, I think the federal reserve as a non-executive non-congressional agency is insane, yes. But as a legal question I would hope the president has to establish the control he's exerting is actually in the executive branch before he tries to exercise constitutional powers of the executive branch that supersede contradictive law.
It would be pretty nuts if the president could just fire whomever he wants no matter what branch they are in based on a simple declaration he considers them to be in the executive branch.
ocdtrekkie · 2026-06-29 17:28:06 UTC
I agree in general, but this is also why I say allowing authoritarianism through technicality. They know by punting to Congress, a body that is completely paralyzed, what the practical outcome of that ruling is.
galangalalgol · 2026-06-29 18:30:38 UTC
I agree that motive is likely in at least one justice. But at the same time, if they really wanted to get back to original principles, they would have to take a wrecking ball to virtually every agency without being able to provide any substitute for the load bearing bits. I think these artificially narrow rulings are what some of the justices think is the middle ground to work in that direction without bringing the roof down. Thomas in particular has advocated for simply taking out the walls and trusting congress and the states will somehow fix everything and it isn't their problem. I think his opinions have occasionally been horribly flawed, but I see his vision and get what he is hoping for. I suspect something like that is the only way a representative democracy could recur in the US. Right now, states with strong geographic bents towards authoritarianism can use power of the federal executive to strengthen their position. If the federal executive had no agencies and was powerless the way Thomas suggests, those states wouldn't have much impact. But that entails acknowledging the entirety of the federal bureaucracy is unconstitutional and creating all sorts of power vacuums. Who knows how that would turn out? I increasingly think it couldn't be worse than the likely end state of a federal autocracy if we don't.
ryandrake · 2026-06-30 00:57:30 UTC
One of Alito's main points appears to be that a search is not really a search, as long as it's laundered through a third party. Scary that this was 6-3
ocdtrekkie · 2026-06-30 01:09:59 UTC
I'm not too surprised because it's this court. I'm happy we can take the win for privacy rights.
We are very lucky we got this outcome out of this, because at least on its face the warrant was pretty well-behaved: They didn't get any identifying information until they had aggressively narrowed suspects. If someone had a convenient CCTV camera where the call was placed it all would have been moot. It's very possible if this geofence plan had only identified one person, the guilty party, it would be very hard to argue it was unreasonably broad as well. And as Alito did point out, this ruling won't actually get the thief out of his case.
We got a win today where a win certainly wasn't expected.
jimbob45 · 2026-06-29 16:50:25 UTC
What if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?
Molitor5901 · 2026-06-29 16:55:20 UTC
That is the loop hole IMO and that's how they will get around it.
twoodfin · 2026-06-29 17:21:13 UTC
This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.
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.
WillAdams · 2026-06-29 17:23:04 UTC
For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:
- 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
bilbo0s · 2026-06-29 17:50:13 UTC
In fairness, I mean, if the people collecting the data sell it on the open market, then you can't realistically expect it to be private.
The only solution in that case is to make it illegal to sell the data. And that's never gonna happen in the US.
ratelimitsteve · 2026-06-29 16:51:36 UTC
rare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.
dmfdmf · 2026-06-29 20:47:59 UTC
Yes, this is the same argument used when the Biden admin during covid pressured the media companies to cancel people and news they did not like for "misinformation" instead of calling it censorship. This and LEOs buying data from Big Corp is just end-running the 1st and 4th amendments which is ultimately fascism.
DANmode · 2026-06-29 22:09:54 UTC
It’s again legal for the US government to publish propaganda targeted against their citizens,
so you’ll struggle to ever know for sure what’s unadulterated US media.
deathanatos · 2026-06-29 23:51:25 UTC
The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites. They were taken to court over both, and they prevailed on the former and lost on the latter: the administration (any administration) is permitted to ask a site for a correction, and it is then truly at the site's discretion. They are not permitted to pressure them.
CobrastanJorji · 2026-06-30 00:41:36 UTC
"Permitted" is doing a lot of work there.
parineum · 2026-06-30 14:58:34 UTC
> The Biden administration both asked nicely for actual, factually incorrect information to be corrected by sites and pressured sites.
Like the definitely known and uncontested factual information on the origin of the virus?
> 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.
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.
xyzzy_plugh · 2026-06-29 17:26:55 UTC
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe this data is persisted, unless they tore open the device to extract logs.
This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.
This smells like an urban myth.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 17:39:15 UTC
I don't think it's implausible that an Echo would have an internal list of trusted Bluetooth devices and their last date of connectivity.
xyzzy_plugh · 2026-06-29 18:27:52 UTC
The original claim is:
> all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders
which is just not how this stuff works. I'd believe it if, say, debug-level logs were being recorded locally. But that would be an incredibly stupid way to burn through your flash storage.
But that's besides the point. A record of the last date of connectivity for trusted devices is an entirely different thing.
I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-29 18:49:24 UTC
My car shows "last seen" on its Bluetooth connections. The murderer in this case was an invited friend; it's hardly implausible he's connected to Bluetooth there.
> I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place.
That they obtained access to the Echo's internals via Amazon is evidence. It sounds like you want proof of a very particular bit of data being in it, which I'd guess the FBI etc. aren't going to provide here.
rootusrootus · 2026-06-29 21:19:22 UTC
> The murderer in this case was an invited friend
Huh? More and more I feel like I must not be thinking about the same Idaho murder case that y'all are talking about.
sidewndr46 · 2026-06-29 18:56:52 UTC
I don't think that is ever admitted into the public record or presented to a jury. An expert reviews it and prevents the conclusions. In the even that you had the knowledge to review it yourself, you're excluded from the jury as jurors aren't allowed to question means and methods.
kube-system · 2026-06-29 19:37:44 UTC
Amazon used Echo devices for all kinds of invasive purposes other than advertised. Tracking the bluetooth identifiers of nearby devices is small potatoes compared to other things they've done:
One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:
> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.
> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.
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.
bombcar · 2026-06-29 17:39:13 UTC
I mean in this case it would also have helped not to have $100k in cash from a bank robbery laying around.
jotux · 2026-06-29 17:46:29 UTC
>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
Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?
autoexec · 2026-06-29 18:01:05 UTC
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
kube-system · 2026-06-29 19:20:18 UTC
A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by cornfields? sure.
A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.
stinkbeetle · 2026-06-29 23:54:37 UTC
I think you might be confusing what the issue is.
As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.
The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.
ButlerianJihad · 2026-06-30 03:29:41 UTC
> reasonable expectation of privacy
That cracks me up honestly.
Imagine in the 1980s if every citizen was compelled to carry a ghetto blaster with 100W amplifier and speakers that relentlessly blared our SSN, phone number, home address and bank accounts.
In biblical times, of course, lepers were legally compelled to identify themselves and warn others with analogous methods.
Now today we all voluntarily carry around radio transceivers that loudly blare unique identifiers, perpetually, omnidirectionally, to anyone and anything that will listen.
Wired connections are so aggressively deprecated that we’re also perpetually exchanging every private conversation, and every secret SMS MFA code, and every DNS lookup, over public airwaves.
It’s not our fault and it’s beyond our control, but if you carry such a ghetto blaster, don’t cry to us about expecting privacy.
kube-system · 2026-06-30 13:20:29 UTC
I’m fully aware of the privacy concerns here; but that wasn’t the topic I was engaging in.
I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.
When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.
cucumber3732842 · 2026-06-30 10:00:59 UTC
>A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.
Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.
kube-system · 2026-06-30 13:17:06 UTC
Picking 1000+ people at random doesn’t fix that problem
cucumber3732842 · 2026-06-30 14:23:01 UTC
Surely one of those thousand can be made to look guilty enough for a prosecution. Solves the problem of looking like you're doing something real well.
The system does not care about prosecuting criminals. It cares about prosecuting people for crimes. While it may prefer to prosecute criminals for their specific crimes that is by no means a hard requirement.
sidewndr46 · 2026-06-29 18:20:11 UTC
one of the more fun things I learned during criminal court in Texas is that the absence of forensic evidence cannot exonerate an individual. The prosecutor and the judge covered that despite not having any forensic evidence, the jury would still be expected to be able to convict the defendant. If you weren't OK with that you weren't eligible to serve on a jury.
alwa · 2026-06-29 18:30:07 UTC
Was your prior assumption that forensic evidence must exist in every case—and that if it doesn’t, then there’s no way to convince a jury of someone’s guilt?
As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?
Comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
What does it mean for a Chief Justice to be in control of their court, and of course, for them to be out of control?
The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.
The CJ's foremost political role is to ensure the judicial branch of government is seen as a politically legitimate institution which wields its power against the other branches in a constitutionally and poltiically legitimate way. If that slips, congress can start hiring/firing; and the executive, in the end, controls the guns -- they can be arrested.
To avoid being arrested or fired, the court has to keep all sides believing the rules they set are fair.
They have no power, in the end, but the power they are allowed to have. They govern by consent of the other branches, and that's trivial to take away
That is entirely not at all what the us constitution says
You are entirely right, we really need to prosecute presidents who do not follow SCOTUS rulings, like [1] and [2]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/joe-biden-student-debt-forgivene...
[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/obama-administration-ignores-supre...
But I am indeed of the inclination that we should demand the rule of law from Presidents of all parties. Generally speaking, I am in favor of a significant downsizing of the authority of the President as a whole. They have far too many powers and are granted too much leniency to use them "in case of emergency" which has increasingly just turned into every President declaring everything they want to do an emergency. Presidents should be subject to prosecution for misconduct, and upheld to the highest standards of the law, and we should have systems in place to swiftly and effectively remove them if they do not meet them. The bar for impeachment and removal is too high when it is unattainable in a two-party system where the President controls one of those parties.
Our country does not need kings of any party.
> Article 50. In accordance with the interests of the people and in order to strengthen and develop the socialist system, citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations.
https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/Russian/const/77cons02....
---
which is to say, "constitutions" as pieces of paper, do not matter. A constitution isnt a document, its literally, how power is constituted by the people.
Paper has no magical power to bring about anything in the world.
One day, decades or centuries or millenia from now -- there will be no USA SC: at one point they will have been arrested, or killed, or retired and not replaced. At once point democracy in the US will fail, and the US will fail, and something else will replace it. Sic transit gloria mundi. So it goes. History goes on.
The world isnt a program, words are not its code. History goes along because power as insittuitionalised by groups of apes, comes and goes.
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.
The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.
It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.
Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.
"We can make rules the President has to follow" does not supersede the Constitution.
(Or act maliciously, as when Alito invented the new "history and tradition" test.)
SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes. "Those rules we agreed to, signed into law, and followed for the last 90 years? HAHA PSYCHE SUCKERS!"
Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.
Today, the Court ruled that Congress can make the Federal Reserve an independent agency, but not the FTC. Same day, same justice!
What are the rules, exactly?
>Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
Congress ceded FTC to the executive branch. Congress put the Federal Reserve in some magical land, outside the executive branch, that doesn't even make sense.
My theory was that SCOTUS ruled the executive had this power over the agencies executive branch. Seems SCOTUS doesn't want to touch federal reserve question with a 10 foot pole. But going back to my original theory, it is a slightly different framing, since everyone involved freely agrees FTC is an executive agency while the federal reserve does not enjoy this agreement.
I do agree the federal reserve as independent makes no sense but I don't think it's the same question posed since you're not starting with the assumption the agency in question is an executive agency. SCOTUS seems to have ruled that an agency in the executive branch has executive control, while not going so far as to determine that the federal reserve is in the executive branch which is an entirely different question.
It's important to note SCOTUS is too chickenshit to rule on anything but in the most narrow way possible. If you ask them to rule on something with a prior established fact that it's in the executive branch you're likely going to get a very narrow ruling that doesn't try to create a unifying theory of everything.
I think it's the core question; are there really rules at all?
The two rulings make that answer clear, I think.
Roberts in Cook says that firing was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". How is the FTC's setup in this regard not part of the same tradition? What part of the Constitution permits the Fed's existence outside of any of the branches? Why can Congress establish a central bank outside the Executive entirely, but not regulate the FTC?
Prove the federal reserve is in the executive branch, and that the ruling of Cook presumed it was, and then you have a point.
I fail to see the inconsistancy.
The US constitution lays out three AND ONLY three branches of government. The congress cannot create a fourth without an amendment. If they create an agency in the executive branch, by definition it reports to the head of the executive.
Sure. So explain the results of Trump v. Cook, which involve exactly that.
The same justice, on the same day, issued one opinion that says Congress can't put limits on firing FTC chairs, and another that Congress can put limits on firing Fed board members.
The ruling in Slaughter was not that president can fire commissioners no matter what branch they are in. It was never established in Trump v Cook that the federal reserve lies in the executive branch.
Your attempt here to falsely portray an inconsistency that doesn't exist. It's a different question as to whether the federal reserve is in the executive branch. You'll have to show the federal reserve is in the executive branch if you want the same ruling to apply or claim this inconsistency.
But that's insane, right?
"You can make an agency the President has no control over, but you can't make one the President has some control over."
It would be pretty nuts if the president could just fire whomever he wants no matter what branch they are in based on a simple declaration he considers them to be in the executive branch.
We are very lucky we got this outcome out of this, because at least on its face the warrant was pretty well-behaved: They didn't get any identifying information until they had aggressively narrowed suspects. If someone had a convenient CCTV camera where the call was placed it all would have been moot. It's very possible if this geofence plan had only identified one person, the guilty party, it would be very hard to argue it was unreasonably broad as well. And as Alito did point out, this ruling won't actually get the thief out of his case.
We got a win today where a win certainly wasn't expected.
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.
so you’ll struggle to ever know for sure what’s unadulterated US media.
Like the definitely known and uncontested factual information on the origin of the virus?
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.
This smells like an urban myth.
> all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders
which is just not how this stuff works. I'd believe it if, say, debug-level logs were being recorded locally. But that would be an incredibly stupid way to burn through your flash storage.
But that's besides the point. A record of the last date of connectivity for trusted devices is an entirely different thing.
I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.
> I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place.
That they obtained access to the Echo's internals via Amazon is evidence. It sounds like you want proof of a very particular bit of data being in it, which I'd guess the FBI etc. aren't going to provide here.
Huh? More and more I feel like I must not be thinking about the same Idaho murder case that y'all are talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:
> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/amazon-partners-with-tile-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?
A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.
As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.
The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.
That cracks me up honestly.
Imagine in the 1980s if every citizen was compelled to carry a ghetto blaster with 100W amplifier and speakers that relentlessly blared our SSN, phone number, home address and bank accounts.
In biblical times, of course, lepers were legally compelled to identify themselves and warn others with analogous methods.
Now today we all voluntarily carry around radio transceivers that loudly blare unique identifiers, perpetually, omnidirectionally, to anyone and anything that will listen.
Wired connections are so aggressively deprecated that we’re also perpetually exchanging every private conversation, and every secret SMS MFA code, and every DNS lookup, over public airwaves.
It’s not our fault and it’s beyond our control, but if you carry such a ghetto blaster, don’t cry to us about expecting privacy.
I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.
When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.
Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.
The system does not care about prosecuting criminals. It cares about prosecuting people for crimes. While it may prefer to prosecute criminals for their specific crimes that is by no means a hard requirement.
As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?