That's a good thing, as it creates a virtuous cycle. There is accountability and more transparency, vs an internal process where the whims of an official, or a failure to have adequate controls inevitably leads to problems.

I'm completely on board with this ruling; the 3rd party doctrine is complete garbage in the digital age, but I think it will have a much narrower effect.

I also don't think this ruling will have any effect on mass surveillance that is justified on a completely different legal basis.

Who's actually auditing these people and holding them accountable?

When was the last time someone lost their job because they issued too many warrants, or were too lax in issuing them?

Is a warrant more than just a rubber stamp?

"Supreme Court asks surveillance state to wear a fig leaf" might be a more accurate title.

But depending on the workload of these people, this can also mean a whole lot of back-log and result in hasty decision making.

Germany has a similar trend where judges are supposed to issue warrants for pretty much everything, like searching your house.

The problem in actual practice with this is that German judges are already overloaded with all kinds of work, which means they have on average around 3 minutes to process a search-warrant request, that time also includes writing the explanation for why it was denied if it should be denied.

3 minutes isn't a lot of time and getting it wrong can have pretty hefty consequences for the wrongly accused because these days it's often routine to confiscate all the IT hardware and any data media they find.

If you are somebody who's self-employed and working in IT, such a search could literally be the end of your business, because it will be years (and many lawyer fees) before you get your stuff back, even if it turns out you never did anything wrong.

I don't really see any real solution to this that doesn't involve either law enforcement toning down the number of requests for warrants or jurisdiction needing to expand its capacities, to allow judges more care in checking individual warrant requests.

It is a vicious cycle as the public has no way to actually find out about bad actions or negligent actions. Public officers in a bureaucracy have broad discretion to implement or ignore controls and are minimally accountable.

In the actual justice system, law enforcement, prosecution and judiciary all have different interests and all have formal process for interaction. For the most part, we know how many warrants are issued, because of court filings. In most cases, state/local prosecutors are elected officials directly subject to the consent of the people. In many cases judges are as well.

That's not to say that the justice system is wonderful and perfect. There's a balance between your privacy and the public interest to prevent crime. We also have things like civil forfeiture that are problematic. But for the most part, we don't have the police feeling empowered to randomly search our cars or homes, because of the legal protections re: search and seizure and the warrant process. That was happening with cellular phones, and this judgement will help eliminate the practice.

Exactly right.

> That's what law enforcement want from this: If you know someone that knows someone that might have committed a crime, they want to invade your privacy "just in case."

It's worse. While they will say that's what they want (and they do want that), what they really want is to look at anyone at any time for any reason. Say, if you tweet something disparaging about police they'd love to be able to look at your info without asking anyone, to see if they can find something on you.

Warrant applications getting denied may be rare in most jurisdictions, but that doesn't mean they are rubber stamped: what probable cause requires in common circumstances being well established by precedent and practice, there is little incentive for law enforcement to waste their own, and judges‘, time on a invalid applications.

I refused, was taken in, given a 'Strafbeschikking' which would have given me a criminal record without going through a court.

I knew the law, knew what I was doing, appealed and won.

But they are constantly stretching boundaries ( ID, ANPR, cell data, internet monitoring and on and on and on ).

Scary.

Because without a warrant requirement they can request vast troves of data, to be stored indefinitely.

1) law enforcement at least does the minimum necessary to be compliant with that warrant and the constitution

2) without the warrant required, there may be (and there is) an additional 10,000% of citizen tracking.

When a warrant is not required, law enforcement can target orders of magnitude more citizens than just "crime suspects" that need to be presented before a court in a warrant.

Also consider that the internal policies of the DOJ are often more restrictive than the restrictions applied by the courts. The government has good reason to avoid testing the boundaries of the law, lest they generate unfavorable precedents that tie their hands down the line.

I hope that illustrates the folly of both statements.

The government has nothing to lose by testing the boundaries of the law, because there are so many undefined and underdefined boundaries. An unfavorable precedent every now and then is a very small price to pay, particularly when playing fast and loose with the rules lets them bring so many more cases. It's like saying one daily speeding ticket resulting in a warning will stop people from speeding on a busy urban interstate.

That said, most warrants to collect evidence are not issued to the DoJ, they are issued to state and local prosecutors, who are often more aggressive than DoJ is (in part because so many AGs are elected, IMO).

It was moving in that direction long before 9/11. It just gained mass notice when everyone started taking off their shoes at the airport.

Getting a warrant is "easy" (far too easy) -- unless you want to get one on every person in your jurisdiction, forever.

I agree, it is unfortunate that for almost two decades fear has overridden rights and warrants even though they are easy to obtain and explicitly stated in the 4th. Warrants provide visibility by at least another party and make mass surveillance more difficult. Maybe warrant records need to be public after x amount of years as well to help monitor surveillance abuses.

Warrants need to extend to all your digital data not only as a protection against unneeded surveillance but to protect business ideas, data and more which corrupt watchers may be intercepting without this oversight of a warrant. Decades in the future if this mass surveillance continues it will be compromised by corporate espionage, compromised people/assets by foreign powers and much worse.

We essentially need an amendment that affirms digital data as part of your "persons, houses, papers, and effects". It could be argued that digital data are your "papers" and "effects".

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

However, my guess is law enforcement using surveillance has become the normal procedure since 9/11 two decades later and recent technological advances (i.e. triangulation, NSLs, metadata, association, IMSI catchers, stingrays, etc) rather than warrants and detective work, the latter which is truly the desirable configuration of justice per the Constitution.

Currently it is way too easy for enforcement to monitor people without a warrant. Noone even knows who owns what stingrays and IMSI catchers even in D.C.[1] I wonder if enforcement even knows how to do actual detective and warrant based work after two decades of abuses. Foreign assets definitely are abusing these systems as well as corporate espionage, blackmail/kompromat collection and more.

> An undisclosed number of surveillance devices known as “Stingrays”—used to track and intercept smartphone communications by posing as legitimate cell towers—are suspected to be in operation across Washington D.C., leading to fears foreign governments are using them to snoop on the capitol. [1]

Too much surveillance and too much data collection without warrants becomes a security hole and a bigger issue than just doing detective/warrant work on actual targets instead of everyone.

I am very happy SCOTUS isn't fully compromised as of yet and this is a victory in privacy but only a step. Privacy invasions based on fear will end badly if it isn't curtailed, not just for individuals but for businesses and nations from corrupt people and foreign assets that use those systems against us.

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/who-tracking-dc-cell-phones-homeland...

Provide numbers or data or real insight on this. You simply saying it does not make it true or factual.

99.97% warrants were approved by FISC between 1979 and 2012.

> It doesn't remotely apply to this case

You have to read comments within the context they were given. This is a broader discussion about warrants, and the specific comment I was replying to asked for data on claims of "rubber stamping" of warrants.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/08/10/...