Re:Cops can easily get months of location data, appeals cour...
by Avshalom on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @07:14AM
(#11813483)
I'm pretty sure that if a firefighter breaks into my house to put out a fire the cops still have to have had a warrant for anything found in the house to be admissible in court.
Re:Cops can easily get months of location data, appeals cour...
by darawk on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @12:58PM
(#11816046)
Not so if there is evidence of a crime in 'plain view'.
Re:Cops can easily get months of location data, appeals cour...
by HappyTypist on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @05:25AM
(#11813089)
The courts also recognise that Boolean oracles do not impede privacy. It's how drug sniffing dogs are justified.
> Requiring a warrant in all circumstances where the government wants to search and/or seize evidence is a cornerstone of a free society. Warrants are a trivial barrier if there is a legitimate investigation with any evidence at all. The "probable cause" requirement is a very low barrier.
We just went over a variety of obvious exceptions to the warrant requirement. You can argue that these are exceptional cases to be sure, but it is certainly not true that a warrant is always required nor should it be (as the comment I was responding to said).
A very slightly less clear-cut example is BAC, as the parent commenter mentioned. It is completely impractical to get a warrant in DUI cases. It would either be a completely meaningless waste of everyone's time, or it'd literally be a rubber stamp, where a cop calls up and receives the warrant with zero interaction or consideration from the judge. And I don't know about you, but i'd rather not open the door to true rubber-stamping of warrants. Because once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time until they start doing it with things that aren't so trivial.