Bank Robber Challenges Conviction Based on His Cellphone's Location Data (apnews.com) 116
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Pres:
Okello Chatrie's cellphone gave him away. Chatrie made off with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded the police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene... Now the Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches... Chatrie's appeal is one of two cases being argued Monday...
Civil libertarians say that geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches," law professors who study digital surveillance wrote the court... In Chatrie's case, the geofence warrant invigorated an investigation that had stalled. After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time it was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for his home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Chatrie's lawyers argued on appeal that none of the evidence should have been used against him. They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.
Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google's location history. A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie's rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.
Civil libertarians say that geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could "unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches," law professors who study digital surveillance wrote the court... In Chatrie's case, the geofence warrant invigorated an investigation that had stalled. After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time it was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for his home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Chatrie's lawyers argued on appeal that none of the evidence should have been used against him. They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.
Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google's location history. A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie's rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.
Double standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
"the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly. "
Ignorance of the law does not make it okay.
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exactly - at best that means the officer can't be charged for a violation of others rights - not a free card to violate their rights and then use the fruit of that illegal activity.
Re:Double standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, when I first heard about qualified immunity (I do not live in the USA) I was gobsmacked. I can't believe it passed constitutional muster.
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Eh, all it did was codify how law enforcement has always operated in the US, all the way back to the founding and writing of the constitution. The police in the US were a combination of essentially private corporate armies and regional gangs that went 'legitimate' since there was nothing to fight them with.
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How does it codify anything? To codify something in law it would need to pass though Congress and be signed into law by a president. None of which happened for "Qualified Immunity". The Supreme Court has no authority to create anything by fiat.
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Police unions and private prisons are powerful lobby groups.
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Yes, when I first heard about qualified immunity (I do not live in the USA) I was gobsmacked. I can't believe it passed constitutional muster.
It's even worse than that. The doctrine flies in the face of the wording of 42 USC 1983, which provides:
Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity
The court that created qualified immunity decided that the plain wording "the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws" really meant "rights, privileges, or immunities" that some court had clearly and specifically established in case law.
While this example is ridiculous, let's say the court had previously found "anally raping a prisoner with a nightstick
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A great example of how racism screws over everyone, even the members of the dominant race.
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Racism? Dominant race?
I could be mistaken, but we, the humans, (the dominant race, under your categorization) fall into the category of "human race".
Saying "I hate blacks" or something (just an example... don't jump down my throat), that's racism (which is really not accurate... nationalism would technically be more accurate, but racism stuck).
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Indeed. This is not even immunity. That just means the officer does not get punished for their illegal behavior. That is already bad. This is about letting the effects of their illegal actions stand and that is completely unacceptable. It essentially means the police is not subject to the law at all. It is what makes a police-state.
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It is getting out of hand how frequent this practice is.
Oh, they picked a juicy one... (Score:2)
Warrant and Third Party Doctrine (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, there was a warrant and the established precedent of the Third Party Doctrine, which hopefully the court reigns in.
Blows my mind how courts haven't done anything about the networks of license plate readers tracking everyone's locations into a historical searchable database with poor access controls, which have neither of those qualifiers.
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Bobert and Massie introduced a bill last week to nuke Third Party Doctrine.
Odds are rhe Uniparty defeats it, but hey.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene was a massive disappointment, tons of Pelosi-style stock trading followed by rage quitting.
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Then, cops can drive all over the county area, burning gas that the taxpayer pays for... or they can look for a license plate spotted recently that matches what the witness to the bank robbery said they saw (including the make/model or color of car or a car with a broken taillight).
While it would be good if they secured it, they shouldn't be taking action on just anyone with a "green pick-up truck with a rusty bumper" unless it matches the plate (at least mostly)... if they do, that's "unlawful search", may
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cops can drive all over the county area, burning gas that the taxpayer pays for..
There's limit to what privacy should be sacrificed for investigative convenience. The Supreme Court has ruled that long-term tracking someone is something that should be considered private, even if slapping a GPS on a car saves gas on following them for a month that's something that requires a warrant and accountability to a independent judiciary.
they shouldn't be taking action on just anyone with a "green pick-up truck with a rusty bumper" unless it matches the plate (at least mostly)... if they do, that's "unlawful search"
That who audits and with what consequences? If there's just an entry in the log with a "green pick-up truck with a rusty bumper" and a random unassociated case id,
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But, if they single out all "green pickups (apparently, that works without the hyphen) with rusty front bumper", and then decide to look for the license plate that was partially remembered by whoever (BW3 or whatever) after the fact... now that they've torn six trucks apart on the side of the road, pulling seats out, cutting them open and all that, they don't have to pay to repair the five trucks that they ripped apart for nothing.
Even though they had the first 3 of the plate (which should have been sent at
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they've torn six trucks apart on the side of the road, pulling seats out, cutting them open and all that,
I think we're talking past each other. The "unlawful search" that's being argued in this case is private location data. But not getting your property destroyed by a search is a further non-digital protection of that same provision.
knowing "Joe Blow"s IMEI
IMEI searches was the last ruling, Carpenter [wikipedia.org], that got restrictions because of a reasonable expectation of privacy to location data from cell phones.
if the system is secure enough that "Joe Blow " can't tap into it
Flock is a bring your own identity system and credentials for police departments have been found in dark web data. Police access can
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Last one first:
The data should be easily accessible/readily searchable (whatever you wanna say, or even both), but only with a warrant to search that data, is reasonable, from the department or some limiting factor.
Haven't you heard the news... sure, you can be private... until you have a cell phone under your name or an internet connection under your name. Did you ever log into a website? Location data!
Flock (and all the wanna-be imitators)... their thing is accessing all databases that _could_ have ID i
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search that data, is reasonable, from the department
Warrants aren't "from the department", but because of constitutional privacy protections require a judicial warrant that has to go through the courts. This is a fundamental problem, if you think this something that the law enforcement agency should be able to do themselves, then you do not believe that a warrant is needed. If there's a there's a reasonable expectation of a citizen to privacy as is a constitutional right, then need a judge or one of the warrant exceptions which will have to be justified late
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The current power to search without warrant is held by the executive branch. Requiring a warrant would give power to the courts...
And the last two cases, Jones and Carpenter, that have reached the Supreme Court resulted in more restrictions.
I'm always amazed (Score:1)
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Turning off location services isn't enough. You can still be roughly located by watching what cell towers your phone connects to.
You could put your phone in wireless mode, but who knows if that's completely safe? Or turn it off, but is that 100% safe? Or best plan, especially if you're planning on robbing a bank, leave your phone at home.
It should still be illegal to do a warrantless location search for someone's phone, no matter what technology is used.
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I meant airplane mode above, obviously. D'oh.
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Yeah, a set of adequate digital radios, allegedly with AES-level encryption, is available for the equivalent of 30 euros + tariff from any Chinese online shopping site, absolutely no reason to carry phones even if it is a group effort.
I mean, if you're robbing a bank you won't care about not having a ham license.
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That way, the police can still find you easier... instead of tracing cellphone towers, they just have to check what ham radio traffic there is and compare it against a list of licensed ham radios in the area (along with the voice, it sends the radio's serial number).
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wat?
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It seems not, because IIRC my Pixel 10 says that even if for instance a thief steal my phone and shutdown it, it will still be traceable for a few hours.
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Leave the phone somewhere that supports your alibi.
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It's not enough if there's a manhunt (like it was for Kevin Mitnick more than 30 years ago) but it would probably be good enough to not get caught into these lazy dragnets. Google can (or could, back then) pull the data for everyone and is a one-stop shop, random providers let aside there are usually multiple ones don't have nice APIs to answer such queries, not all last-mile devi
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Maybe just leave the cell phone at home if you're planning to commit a felony
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Even phones that are glued shut (which, is the majority, if I remember right)? Sure, if you have a heating blanket and a handful of guitar picks and like 20 minutes... though, I kinda doubt that.
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People don't turn off their location services not because of privacy but because it just wrecks your battery.
Sure, if you're talking a badly behaving 3rd party app that constantly requests your location in the background, but restricting all your 3rd party apps to "allowed while using" seems to work well enough for me. Then again, I'm using an iPhone 15 Pro and not a relic from a decade ago.
Of course, as someone else already mentioned, this doesn't actually prevent LEOs from tracking you down, but it might annoy Facebook's ad algorithm a bit (not that you should even give Facebook location access anyway).
The lesson here kids (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dont take your cellphone when out committing crimes.
The old adage, "dumb criminals get caught" is still valid.
So security cameras = bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
Point being, these arguments seem pretty equivalent, just something to think about.
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Everyone's fine with security cameras...
I'm not so sure that's a true statement.
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Strength of him being nearby isn't the same as him doing it.
Me and you could be in the area... me at the ATM (but never going inside the bank) and you getting coffee next door, even though we were close by, neither one of us entered the bank (by location data _and_ CCTV), which all back-up our alibi's... they can (we'll let them even) _non-destructively_ search our cars, and find nothing... we should be free to go.
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Everyone's fine with security cameras,
Absolutely not, no.
I have some on my private property, because you don't have an expectation of privacy when trespassing on private property. But in public, we all should not feel under constant surveillance. There's a reason why China et al love total surveillance of the population so much.
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Would you rather have evidence when your kid is abducted or your wallet or car keys are stolen or someone attacks you, or not?
Any of those can happen at any time, anywhere.
You can say/argue that we're civilized enough these days that those things don't happen... are you sure? Maybe it's not a universal thing where the whole world has the exact same amount of those things, but they happen.
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Would you rather have evidence when your kid is abducted or your wallet or car keys are stolen or someone attacks you, or not?
Leading question.
Would you want to spend your entire life in a small cell all by yourself? Because then your wallet definitely won't get stolen.
Yes, life is not risk-free. But we have done a great job at making it several orders of magnitude less risky without mass surveillance, and it is doubtful if turning a free society into a police state would do all that much on top of that.
Every time you sit in your car, you risk injury, permanent disfigurement or disability and death - because all of these happen ev
You are misreading the article (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the police are pulling security camera data for blocks and blocks of the city.
That's the analogy. The problem here is that they are casting a ridiculously wide net. They aren't allowed to go on fishing expeditions. Warrants are required to be specific and limited in order to prevent the police from using them to harass the public.
Part of this is because we understand that just the accusation of a crime can cause serious damage even the innocent people. Part of this is because we recognize that everybody does something mildly illegal from time to time but that doesn't really bother the general public...
But the other big reason why we control the police is because we know damn well that they periodically abuse power to get fake convictions. It's not hard to find video evidence of this but I recommend looking up any one of the many videos John Oliver has done on the subject of police interrogations or police in general.
Basically the courts know that we don't really trust the police and so we limit the scope of their actions to limit the potential abuses.
Kind of a silly way to prevent abuses but it's how we do things
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Unless Fish and Game knows there's a shark somewhere in the childrens swimming-pool. Then they can catch any damned fish they want to ! If they catch something other than a shark
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Security cameras do not identify a person of non-interest with direct identifying information. If you want to make a comparable case then it would be: security cameras combined with auto face recognition and a database of faces = bad.
And yes objectively so. We'd be having the same discussion.
It's the difference between your car having a license plate and showing up on camera footage, and the government having a database of your car's location at any point in time for easy look-up. Your generalised "security
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A typical security camera doesn't track every imaged person home on the chance that someone may want to accuse them of a crime next week.
However, real-time policing centers are starting to combine the field of view of multiple camera systems to automatically track people as they move about.
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I don't think it's a purely black and white issue, but on the scale of things, capturing with visible light is relatively benign. Requiring effort to convert the captured data into a name is relatively benign. Not storing the data in a central database is relatively benign. Not giving out the data without some effort such as a court order is relatively benign. And not using the data to track a person's movements is relatively benign. But once you venture outside of these parameters, it becomes more of a pro
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Capturing in the visible-light spectrum: that happens all the time... you go to a bar, and some gals do a big selfie celebrating someone's 25 1/4 birthday or something (maybe you're in view range).
If you don't store it, that implies you have big enough room of fast enough computers to sort through everything in real-time to trace "that guy who hit that woman" (so, in real-time, without storing, you could in theory track him until he goes in the alley without cameras and lose him)... if you had his IMEI (do
Re: So security cameras = bad? (Score:2)
"Everyone's fine with security cameras"
Um, no. In many, many countries, including mis if Europe, you cannot have cameras aimed at public spaces. For exactly the reasons listed. People moving in public spaces have a right to do so without being tracked.
Wait! What? (Score:5, Interesting)
They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.
Gathering other people's location data was a violation of Chatrie's privacy? What if I was one of those "other people" and I say I don't care if the police accessed my location data. And every other innocent person in that net said the same thing? Chatrie can't hide behind my rights.
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What if I was one of those "other people" and I say I don't care if the police accessed my location data.
Unless they acquired your explicit consent BEFORE the information gathering, the argument would still be the same.
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Gathering other people's location data was a violation of Chatrie's privacy?
No. It's bad wording. They are challenging the entire validity of the permit because it's a privacy violation to scoop data up like this in a general case. Yes even a criminal has a right to privacy, and these due process issues exist to protect all people from government phishing.
Doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
You can say that you don't need clean drinking water and that's fine. But we aren't going to let you drink dirty water because even though you might not think you need clean drinking water in reality you do and it has serious implications for the rest of the society when you start chugging water for deadly chemicals and bacteria.
I mean if you just drop dead whatever but that's not what people who do st
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a) You don't know *before the fact* that Chatrie isn't one of the "other people".
b) You don't know *before the fact* that the "other people" concented.
The State *explicitly* can't hide behind an assumed waiver of individual rights.
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Oh look, someone who doesn't understand that if anyone is denied due process, everyone is.
Anyone who cannot understand why the fourth reich is rising should just read your comment so they can understand how stupid Americans are.
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Oh oh. The hive mind of collectivism rears its ugly head. Civil rights are held by individuals. Not groups, other than to the extent that we have the right to freely associate and form them. Or not, if it suits our individual wishes.
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Everyone is entitled to du e process, but if the evidence stacks up high enough in favor of you being guilty without a doubt, because of location and surveillance data, which can be matched to a car that sped away from the bank, that makes you a person of interest, then they do CSI stuff.
Without all that data, they'll spend a week interviewing every person in and around the bank, and maybe get lucky.
After the fact, it takes a subpoena to get the phone's tracking info, assuming you even know who's IMEI to lo
Re: Wait! What? (Score:2)
The same thing could happen to you just because GPS reception was poor, accuracy fell, and the GPS reported motion which didn't actually occur.
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WTF are you talking about... "dog in the hunt"?
Who are you talking/referring to/about?
WTF are you saying?
Re: Wait! What? (Score:2)
If that fucker is not a bot, he's the most irritating idiot who ever had an account here.
You can always tell someone has nothing worth saying when they post in monospace text to get attention.
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Who knows... maybe a bot, or a person on some really bad moonshine or acid or crack.
Meh... the monospace thing is just part of the site... I noticed it with my comments... I always do the double-space thing between a period/exclamation point/question mark. (that is two spaces, between the period and the parenthesis).
I think the site's coding deletes the second space, when it's used... and most people don't know about the double-space thing... though, that's how I write my posts anywhere (and anything else
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They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.
Gathering other people's location data was a violation of Chatrie's privacy? What if I was one of those "other people" and I say I don't care if the police accessed my location data. And every other innocent person in that net said the same thing? Chatrie can't hide behind my rights.
If the police put out a call and asked everyone who was in the area at the time to voluntarily tell them so, that would be fine, and you offering up your location history would be your decision. I'd probably offer up mine, too.
But that's not what happened here.
What happened is that the warrant authorized the police to scoop up everyone's data regardless of whether they were willing to offer it. We do allow police to violate the privacy of people in narrow, carefully-specified ways because it's necessar
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That's what warrants are for.
And it's just your opinion that the right to privacy trumps the good of society. What about my having to report my income every year on the Ides of April just for "the good of society"? Who gave you or some court the right to take that constitutionally granted right away from me?
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That's what warrants are for.
Indeed, but not all warrants are constitutionally-valid, and that's what this is about.
And it's just your opinion that the right to privacy trumps the good of society.
Sure, the scope of the 4th amendment is something that has to be decided through legislation and judicial review. My opinion is that based on the history of 4A precedents, this crosses the line. Several district court judges and appellate courts have agreed with me. One appellate court disagreed with me... which is why it's in front of SCOTUS, whose job it is to resolve the question when appellate courts disagree.
As a
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Flat out... no.
If all they had was witness statements (totally), they'd be looking for a few hundred people... (old Suzie says "it was a brownish truck", Joe says "it was a green pickup", Maisie says it was "an off-green Chevy", and Jimmy from the deli says "he thought he saw a plate that said BGT, or, 867")... a collective vague description like that without video evidence, could end up with either interviewing a few hundred people and losing the guy, or by some major miracle, someone mentions he was a "wh
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I'm not disagreeing at all... cameras that can get a good pic of any of us or read our license plates are what we need.
If someone touched my kid inappropriately (if I had kids), I'd rather have it on some camera so they can nail the bastard... if all we have to go off is "I saw a guy in a grey hoodie wearing a baseball cap and faded blue jeans", they'll probably never find him, and my daughter will never be the same.
At the same time, the PD and everyone else shouldn't just be trolling through the data looki
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Chatrie doesn't have standing to bring a case to court on my behalf.
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Chatrie doesn't have standing to bring a case to court on my behalf.
Any person has that standing because they also have rights.
It's also not your behalf specifically, it's all people's behalf, because we all have a right to be free from overly broad surveillance.
In a world in which the police were trustworthy we wouldn't need any of this. But in a world in which people were trustworthy, we wouldn't have police, because slavery never would have existed...
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It's also not your behalf specifically, it's all people's behalf,
All people. Including criminals? It damages my good relations with law enforcement if they must assume I have to be served with a warrant every time they need some data to solve a crime. This attitude is creating a de facto relationship between a bunch of criminals and myself. It damages my constitutional right of freedom of association in that I can no longer choose not to associate with these groups.
No. You can't hide behind my civil rights.
So, no video allowed either? (Score:4, Interesting)
When looking at a video recording from around the crime scene, it shows more than one person at a particular place/time. Any or none of them could be guilty of the crime, but all are observed on video.
When looking at a list of phones present from around the crime scene, it lists more than one person at a particular place/time. Any or none of them could be guilty of the crime, but all are on the list.
I'm not sure I see a particular distinction between the two.
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Video evidence shows people who are near the video camera. And lets face it: When you're out in public, you don't have much expectation of privacy.
Cellphone location data shows where you went anywhere in the world. That's a lot more information about you than can be gleaned from a few video cameras near the location of interest.
And if you're out in public, you can wear a big hat and a face mask (relatively normalized since COVID) if you're worried about being identified on video. There's no analogous
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That's what cameras are for... if Joe, Edith, and Harry were nearby... who shows up on all the area's cameras?
Edith was feeding pigeons on a bench in front of the bank, Harry was getting a latte across the street, Joe was seen entering the bank, and then running out to his "green pickup with a rusty bumper, and a partial visible plate of B (or 8) G (or 6) T (or 7)".
With cameras, you can feed that information to PDs and State Troopers... if you can match that to a cellphone at the same time, you can easily f
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looking at a video recording
Would you find it different if it was for all the video cameras in the city for several hours? Because it's the overbroad scope of the warrant that's particularly being taken issue with.
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Why geofencing? (Score:1)
Can't telcos provide location data of accused criminal's phone with time stamps and let police find out whether he was in the vicinity of the bank when crime happened?
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At that point, they didn't have a suspect, and they used the location data to work out who they thought the guilty person was.
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Right, they didn't have a suspect... but between surveillance from the bank, license plate readers, and cellphone tracking data (most likely traced to his IMEI), that all can put him close enough to the scene to be worth a little talk at a minimum, and maybe someone checks his vehicle and residence without damage (they have people who are experts at lockpicking and disabling security systems on payroll).
Without the info, the best you can do is talk to everyone at the bank and hope someone remembers enough,
the Defendant is Irrelevant (Score:1)
They ALWAYS do (Score:2)
"officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly. "
Of course, they all are always 'convinced', they are badly trained, no clue about the law, or the rights of persons, the qualified immunity shields them from their own stupidity.
That immunity has to go.
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You are an asshole. The law either applies to everybody or it essentially applies to nobody. Apparently you want that. Because this one bank-robber does not matter in the greater scheme of things. Freedom and the rule of law, however, does matter.
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Also funny how "believing to have acted properly" is not protection under the law for anybody else. Allowing clearly illegal actions to stand is not even immunity. That would just mean this officer having acted illegally does not get punished. Allowing the evidence to stand goes far deeper and essentially removes all requirements to follow the law from the police. Like, you know, in a full-blown police state. One step before a full authoritarian state, one of the most evil constructs the human race knows.
This is the road to hell (Score:1)
Now, the argument that a police officer just needs to "believe" they act properly for clearly illegally evidence suddenly being admittable is already more than deep intellectual dishonesty. It essentially means the police can do no wrong and the law does not apply to them. That is one of the core characteristics of a police-state.
Second, if they let this stand just because it allows one scumbag to stay convicted, they have found the ideal way to ultimately remove all civil liberties: Just find one reference
What makes this different from security cameras? (Score:2)
If a crime was committed in front of a security camera, judges have no problem with signing a subpoena to release the video to see who was in the area at the time. If a crime was committed within cellphone towers, why wouldn't a judge be ok with signing a subpoena to release the list of cellphones that were in the area at the time?
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This is a false analogy.
First of all, cameras only record your appearance, and courts have always held that you have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" as regards to your physical appearance while in a public space. In contrast, cell phone location data can reveal private intimate details like visits to a doctor or a psychiatrist even if you are not a suspect.
Second, a camera is a fixed point in space, and only happens to capture people who happen to walk past it. On the other hand getting location dat
Somebody's belief is now above the Constitution? (Score:2)
A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie's rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly
This is a pathetic interpretation of the Constitution. What the officer believes is irrelevant! It's what he knows that count. Don't get me wrong guys, they got the right guy and he confessed. He earned his sentence. But back to the truth; at the time of filing the application for the surveillance, the cop DID NOT know anything and he didn't have the authority NOR the qualification to "believe" that he was acting properly, when it comes to constitutional rights. The judge should issue the ruling based on
uh yeah that's how it almost always works (Score:4, Insightful)
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If everybody that was convicted was guilty there wouldn't be any problems and very few people would have any sort of complaints about the justice system. And yet...
Re:uh yeah that's how it almost always works (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is exactly why we need to create some kind of 'concerned citizen' or 'public interest speculative' type of standing.
Obviously it can't and should not be just anyone can sue the government or challenge a law for any reason. That would making legislating anything successfully extremely difficult because anyone with with very different real reasons can come a long an challenge every law with some corner case, and it would also burden the courts excessively deliberating over issues that are not really issues.
On the flip side the can't sue anyone over warrant-less wiretapping is ridiculous. Nobody can sue because they can't show evidence they were personally spied on without due process, even when there is abundant public evidence unauthorized spying did occur, is travesty of justice and startlingly unnecessary barrier to accountability.
I don't have a great answer or real policy here, just the vague idea that we need to lower the barrier that is legal standing to something were you don't need to show a personal harm, but also not throw the doors to the court room open entirely.
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Surely they had to have gotten warrants for other homes of people who were innocent?
No. They did not.
The original geofence warrant identified 19 devices.
The police narrowed it down to nine that fit the movement pattern and requested more detailed information on those nine.
The police then requested the identifying information (actual names) of the three most suspicious individuals.
They did a background check and identified Mr. Chatrie as the most likely suspect based on his criminal record and other factors.
Only his home was searched. A few more might have been searched if nothing was found
Re:uh yeah that's how it almost always works (Score:4, Insightful)
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-- H.L. Mencken
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What if... the people in the bank described him as "an Asian male, about 5' 6", wearing a black hoodie and blue jeans... and they saw him get in a yellow Cadillac or Lincoln (a bigger car)"... that's enough info to go off of... traffic cams would see that, and if you find a car that seems like it's trying to get away that is owned by a guy who is close enough to that description... and if the IMEI data puts him right there (within a hundred feet, I think it is), that's the guy you should be looking for.
Or..