Sure, though it’s worth noting that nothing prohibits the police from walking down the street and asking people. Those people don’t have to talk to the police, but…
Google will fight warrants like this. AT&T doesn’t. Other companies have varying policies on this.
Obviously, one can’t assume data is not available to law enforcement merely because the police would need a warrant to get it over a possessor’s objections.
This isn't really true. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act prohibits third parties from sharing electronic communications without a warrant. It doesn't matter if they are the legal owner of the data, if it is about a third party that has fourth amendment protections.
Search history, and Google's analytics about you, are a gray area, because you are communicating with Google, not using Google as a transport layer with an expectation of privacy.
Like, if the FBI asked me for my text messages with person X, I can hand them over if I want since they are my communications, but if they want the texts from my phone company they are legally protected. Using search is like texting Google.
Maybe that is where the warrant comes in, to make it plausible that it is required?
I guess we'll find out when they arrest the first EU citizen based on this data.
German law uses this to allow "non-public" controllers/processors (aka companies) to give data to German (and EU) law enforcement[1]. The police still needs to specify legal grounds, e.g. the investigation of a concrete alleged crime, and "drag net" investigations are generally not legal. The controller/processor has no obligation to give data to the police if they just ask, but it can if the police request is narrow enough and names the legal grounds. If there is a court order, that's another matter, then the company is obligated to provide the data.
But what about the US law enforcement wanting data about some German citizen within the scope of the GDPR and German law? A service provider is not allowed to give US law enforcement such data[2][3], but in this case the US law enforcement will usually use the mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) between the US and Germany to ask the German police for help, and the German police will then essentially ask for the data and (provided there are legal grounds) the service provider is allowed to pass data to the German police, which passes it back to the US law enforcement.
Legislation in other EU member states is mostly quite similar.
[0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-23-gdpr/
[1] https://dsgvo-gesetz.de/bdsg/24-bdsg/
[2] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-48-gdpr/
[3] But it really becomes complicated when the service provider is under US jurisdiction (in this example). Then the service provider is caught between competing law of two different jurisdictions and is in the unfortunate position to decide what law to break.
See https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ (6)(1)(c) (6)(3)(a/b) and https://gdpr-info.eu/art-48-gdpr/ (48)
That's not to say I know how a Google would react to a US warrant about an EU citizen (especially given the CLOUD act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act) but from what I can tell it's not permitted under GDPR
Yet they always do! Weird how that works out.
They are already complying. It's right there in the article.
How many keyword-search warrants have they fought? The article seems to suggest google has been providing data to the us government in the past and that this is an on-going collaboration.
This isn't a hypothetical situation - according to the LA Times, it's how they ended up cracking the Austin bombing case that involved the Google warrant [1]:
> Trying to find the buyer of the nails, officials “went to every hardware store” in the area to find customers who had made large purchases, and they struck gold with a Home Depot store in the Austin suburb of Round Rock, McCaul said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
> “The fatal mistake that led law enforcement to him — because he was pretty good at evading surveillance cameras — was when he walked into Home Depot,” McCaul said. Investigators obtained surveillance video of Conditt walking into the store in a wig and walking back out to a vehicle with a license plate connected to his name.
So I think there's a little more nuance here. Certainly matching a list of generic terms seems too broad. But a warrant for specific keywords that was limited to a specific city and time frame might be analogous to going to all the hardware stores in the city and pulling security footage?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-austin-bombings-suspect...
Scenario: Hello fellow criminals. Instead of point to point communication, we will make random posts/pages that have our combination of words on them. So if you want to read our communication, do a google search for the exact quote "purple antelope shoe couch can squirrel."
Though some of those bomb searches could easily be made by anyone curious about past bombing incidents. I've certainly had some curiousity-based searches about how the Unibomber did his work.
How do we end up defining naturally? That's a question the court would ask, and want to be able to provide a litmus test for going forward. I'm not sure how we do that here... Statistical probability at some specific threshold? It's a difficult question.
I also looked up whether PLA can be made conductive and if it shows up normally in x-rays, to determine if I could legally 3D print the lower receiver for a handgun in my state.
...come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if I tripped some queries, and they just realized I'm an insatiably curious but harmless nerd and left me be.
Come back with a warrant
I'd get one, but I'm afraid someone would steal it.
We can probably figure out how to extract such data and cross reference it without making any of it available to random government employees.
Say you take pictures of license plates, store the data some place safe and allow a query of 5 recent armed robbery locations. If the result contains multiple cars matching 2 locations no results are returned. The moment a 6th robbery happens and a single car matches 3 out of 5 law enforcement can start looking for it immediately.
Sure, you'd get pretty mad if every time you get robbed the police searches your vehicle but they don't need to break anything and you will get over it.
Or I'll stop calling the police, especially if that first invasive experience doesn't end with my belongings returned.
A lot of people I know who carry renter's insurance were unaware it covered their stuff like that. YMMV on what is and is not covered though.
Oh my sweet summer child. Calling the police is never about getting the belongings back. Calling the police is only about striking the perpetrator with violence, hoping that it would equalize the karma levels.
Or, you know, prevent them from doing crimes again.
It's a vengeance based system.
Unfortunately. But the criminal still can't commit crimes while in prison though. Vengeance just also means that solving the problem of any individual criminal is usually only temporary.
It should count for anything.
I often think we need to bring back something like monks who selflessly deliver a service in exchange for an isolated life of study and meditation.
We have way to many shit people who cant be trusted with anything and make poor company.
* A dude who managed solid D grades throughout elementary and middle school despite a good & supportive family life & voluntarily chose to hold himself back a grade (8th grade) to "have a better chance of a football career to get into the NFL"
* A dude who, for as long as I can literally remember, talked about how he was going to be some kickass marine. Talked about it all the time, for years. He was also a solid D (even in shop class) student & football player. Not only did he fail, to my knowledge, in every metric required to be a marine - he managed to fail, which I truly didn't know was possible, every metric required to be an army grunt - except presumably the physical requirements. It wouldn't be hard for me to imagine him failing a cardio requirement tho.
This dude couldn't get in the lowest levels of our fucking army. I really only thought you could be disqualified for things like admitting to drugs or having felonies, but he managed to fuck up some test of intelligence they require.
* & several generations of people who are similar fuckups like these two.
Now, what do people like this on a police force manage to get up to?
Last month, there was a domestic violence call somewhere in the town. By the time the cops got there, dude was out on the curb, in his car, with his kid (wife had said he had a gun and threatened her with it, he did not have a gun)
Police haphazardly blocked him into the curb with their cruisers, and surrounded him with their guns out, in a crossfire with themselves. Proceeded to scream absolutely incoherent shit at the dude, while he's in the turned off & parked car with his hands clearly visible on the wheel - kid in the back seat, for about 10 minutes. Dude finally decides nothing good is going to come out of this & decides to attempt to leave. Turns car on, very slowly tries to turn out of how they'd blocked him in, and very slightly bumps a cruisers bumper (nobody was in the cruiser)
One cop then randomly decides to shoot. Keep in mind, I earlier mentioned the cops put themselves in their own crossfire. I have absolutely no fucking idea how, but one cop shot the other cop in the shoulder. This was the very first bullet fired by anybody, and as stated, the perp didn't even have a gun.
Cop yells out he's hit, and then all cops present go fish in a fucking barrel on the car, with the child in it, to the tune of 67 bullets IIRC.
The local news &, as you can assume, all Facebook groups, report that the man opened fire on police, and that the cops had then killed him. All comment sections swarmed with the local painkiller addicted retirement community saying "good, he should be dead" - and that reporting is now unchallengeable canon in their dementia ridden but still able to vote minds.
There's still an ongoing investigation by the state as to how the chucklefuck cop managed to go full retard enough to blast his buddy, but having gone on so long I'm sure it's going to end up as another "we've investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing"
The service isn't "worthless"
It's downright fucking dangerous to anything and everything around it, like the person legally in the crosswalk, who was hit at 120mph+ by a cop SUV and turned into mostly red mist, no significant body parts to be found, by one of the squadrons of cops responding to the aforementioned call.
We could especially do without "the local painkiller addicted retirement community" saying and "their dementia ridden but still able to vote minds". That's a slur, and those are not welcome here, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The article itself doesn't mention the speed anywhere - though this is my first time actually reading it. The reason I'm otherwise aware of the speed is because a family member is on the city council and also the head of our emergency department.
The officer driving died (at the aforementioned emergency room), first time I'm seeing of that. I was aware he was badly injured, but didn't think it was death. The front of the SUV looks just about like what you'd presume 100mph+ does.
> A cop going 120mph in response do a domestic incident doesn’t sound normal.
This is part of the point I'm trying to make. It's a common feature amongst small towns, especially in the MidWest, of cops being complete and utter menaces to society. He hit two other cars as well, fortunately no passengers were injured. None of which had to happen, all of which happened because of a cop wanting to go hero mode and break laws for a measly domestic call he wasn't even needed at. Responding to shots fired they say, not telling him it was his own men's shots...
Hilariously, not a singular article of many states anything about the fact it was entirely his fault. Box truck he slammed into was crossing the intersection with a green light, unaware of the cop barreling down the street without even turning his sirens on until he'd nearly hit him. Small town reporting for you I guess. Incident "still under investigation" by the highway patrol...
Tell us the one about the Long Night and the Others, Old Nan!
This is so difficult, more or less impossible. Prosecutors and LE will likely not bring forward a criminal case based on this sort of unlawful search, as the discovery would detonate the case if brought before a mildly competent defense. The defense would have a really great speaking season following the court proceedings if they were to catch such a windfall.
I speculate that these sort of illegal searches are conducted regularly, and serve to fuel parallel construction.
In the OP article, it says that LE "did not need to use these search warrants to find the bomber" whose picture is inline, instead they correlated his "unique pink construction gloves" to some home depot footage of his purchase, linking his identity to the purchase with video evidence.
I think it is very possible for parallel construction to provide the required leads to locate this video footage. The search warrants can be as illegal as the day is long, but their effect may remain invisible so long as it generates a lead which is not obviously poisoned fruit.
Honestly, my feeling is the moment judges and congress felt OK with actions even pondering such acts we had a fundamental democratic problem in our hands.
As they say if you put a cop car on someone's tail they are going to get a ticket.
"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." -Lavrenti Beria, ironically, before his 1953 trial and execution.
Beria was a monster, hated by many of his countrymen. Who would argue against such a puppet trial? So long as justice is served.
But it's for a somewhat meta-reason: there have been numerous cases where something strikes me as blatantly unconstitutional, but the SCOTUS has allowed it anyway.
I don't think putting people that want to inform themselves under suspicion is feasible and it probably should not be legal. This isn't conductive to solving crimes and has severe chilling effects.
Edit: why am I being downvotes? The president explicitly stated his plan to ignore another SCOTUS ruling
People only think executive overreach is cool as long as they can ignore the downsides.
> The president knows this. He told the press that his administration had surveyed the opinions of constitutional scholars, and that most thought an extension would be unlawful. Yet under political pressure from the left, Biden nevertheless ultimately decided to issue the extension.
In other words: SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.
I could certainly see the argument that it's ill-advised, and indeed, it was struck down a few weeks later. However, I don't think concurring opinions are binding and you could imagine certain fact patterns that might have changed Kavanaugh's mind: Congress agrees on a similar extension, but there's a short gap before it comes into effect, the situation worsens dramatically, the extension is much more narrowly tailored, etc.
It's not illegal at all. Making it illegal would never work in practice.
It is however supposed to be politically embarrassing and should in theory hurt your party.
However right now, in practice, due to the polarized two-party shit show that is US politics at the top level, it doesn't matter. The constituents haven proven to lack both will and tools to hold their elected representatives accountable, who in turn have learned they can get away with pretty much anything.
What could they have done to avoid a president who would behave that way? Elect Trump? Hah.
If I were placing blame here, I'd put at least part of it on the SC for not giving a real ruling on it in the first place. There was speculation about an extension in the air already at the time, and they could have cut that short.
SCOTUS said the moratorium exceeded the CDC's legal authority, but declined to strike it down given it was soon expiring [1]. (They also strongly suggested that if POTUS tried renewing, they would strike it down.) POTUS tried renewing. SCOTUS struck it down.
None of this is properly construed as POTUS ignoring SCOTUS. When SCOTUS struck down the law, POTUS obliged.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/06/divided-court-leaves-evic...
At least other administrations justify their attempts to break the law and mount some defense.
There isn't a mechanism to stop unconstitutional laws from being passed or left on the books.
for example, if the Court ruled that the Controlled Substances Act were unconstitutional, the government would be forced to free prisoners convicted of violating it, since the law was illegitimate the whole time. but if Congress repealed the act, they'd have no such obligation, since it was still a crime when the felony was committed.
The court doesn’t get to make law by threatening to make law. They have to actually do it.
You can't really avoid this either without throwing out judicial precedent because "knowing how the court will rule on subsequent cases" is basically the same as law.
But that's not law. That's consistent interpretation of law. Very different.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-supreme-court-st...
> The president knows this. He told the press that his administration had surveyed the opinions of constitutional scholars, and that most thought an extension would be unlawful. Yet under political pressure from the left, Biden nevertheless ultimately decided to issue the extension.
In other words: SCOTUS wrote words clearly indicating a ban would be illegal. By a technicality (expiration date), they didn't issue an explicit ruling. Biden did it anyway, while admitting he knew it was illegal.
And the administration gets to say they did all they could and it’s up to congress now.
Nobody alleged anything was unconstitutional. The question was whether the CDC exceeded the authority Congress gave it. The Court declined to answer that question when it was first raised. It answered it, definitively, the second time, striking down the moratorium extension.
Seems like they are kind of picking and choosing what rules they'll follow, and which rights they think people deserve
The Court originally declined to vacate the stay in a 5-4 decision. The fifth vote was from Kavanaugh, who wrote that he thought the stay should be vacated, but wasn't voting to do so because the moratorium was about to expire anyway. That concurrence is certainly informative, but doesn't override his actual vote to maintain the stay.
The second moratorium was quickly overturned, with Kavanaugh voting this time in accordance with his opinion. In any case, the administration did actually follow that ruling.
This is taken directly from the actual decision (the first round is discussed on page 4): https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a23_ap6c.pdf
And what was his plan if they did violently take over DC? The largest army in the world would just take it back. Don't tell me they would follow his orders, they didn't like him before he started killing US civilians, politicians, and cops.
I guess we'll see what the committee discovers. Apparently, it's your belief that they'll discover nothing of significance in the next three years, but maybe we'll see after.
All Caesar had to do was harness this growing discontent of the masses through his fake populism and having undying loyalty in much of the army helped as well.
It took just one generation after Ceasars assassination for the establishment of the Imperium and the dissolution of the Republic.
Trump might or might not be reinstated but the beginning of the end of the American experiment has already been set in motion.
The only way to save it is through a radical reorganisation of power to counter the one to come but the establishment want to keep returning to the supposed Utopia that was in place before Trump - missing the obvious fact that it was their "utopia" that lead to Trump in the first place.
Sure, it's probably pointless to try to argue that there was some specific point where it changed from "is a democracy" to "isn't a democracy," or to try to argue that it's "55% a democracy now." The actual point is whether there are important institutions that have weakened or failed, whether there is indication that this will continue, and what the consequences will be.
I could be wrong, since it's been some years.
This is the key that people often miss in this regard. The staggering ROman Republic was hardly a great country.
Also, common to Rome is the notion that they are a special people who deserve dominion over the rest of the world. It might be shrouded in more egalatarian language (cue the exporting "freedom" talk) but barely so.
We need a new American experiment that is actually government by the people. One that doesn’t take ownership of other people as a founding principle (but you know, it’s cool because we took it back).
This is the reason votes in rural areas count so much more than urban votes. Because rural areas in the south were heavily populated by enslaved people and the slavers (meaning not just the title holding slave owners; many people who did not own slaves were still fundamental players in the system of slavery) held a lot of influence.
Also, in 1790 the US was much less urbanized. 5% of people lived in cities (vs 80+% today), and the economy was primarily agricultural. It was not a world in which the rural-urban divide was particularly significant. All states were rural states.
If every political decision in the US before the Civil War was made with the aim of preserving slave state power, why is it the South that left the Union? Couldn't they have just used their power?
I'd like to correct my previous comment. I said that the three-fifths compromise was the only consitutional component of slavery; in fact there were two others. The fugitive slave clause, and a clause forbidding the federal government from restricting the slave trade. I apologize for these errors.
They left because they were worried about losing their power — the northern population grew much faster than the south, and as the country expanded west most of the settlers were from free states, bringing attitudes about slavery with them. Things had reached a point where even deep compromises couldn’t tip the scales in the slavers’ favor, so the slavers decided to withdraw to attempt to preserve their power.
There were a significant number of northerners who were active abolitionists and not involved in politics. John Brown is an American hero in my mind. Slavery was doomed regardless of the political order, but the political order tried to protect it nonetheless.
AFAIK a warrant usually is tied to a specific person or a specific crime. In other words, if an explosion killed Harry McHarryface, then it would be constitutional to ask for names of people who searched for Harry.
Or if the fertilizer used in the bomb was shown to have been purchased on March 10, then maybe a search for "fertilizer" in the weeks before March 10 would be allowed.
But not a generic search.
Just my opinion that's not legal advice.