I'd like to leave the question of why that's true as an exercise for the reader, but your comment makes it sound as if you have trouble with this concept, so let's be explicit - a state operating autocratically can, and often will, rubberstamp whatever it decides it wants to do.
Had a quick look for the numbers from FISA to give you an example of this. https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2013/06/fisa-co... says that they denied 11 requests for surveillance warrants out of 33,900 requests over 33 years of operation.
That's a pass rate of 99.07%!
So allow me to say - a warrant wouldn't have changed anything, they give them out like nothing.
In the article though, it does say: "ICE did not respond to requests for comment from SAN. It is not clear whether ICE or any other law enforcement agency obtained a warrant to use an IMSI catcher — commonly referred to as a “Stingray” — to conduct surveillance."
On the contrary, I don't think there's anything more relevant.
That such action can be legal speaks volumes about the state of what is legal and tolerated within the US. This, like pretty much everything about the current administration, is not explicitly about Trump, but something that has been cooking for at the very least the past two decades.
I think the parent poster is saying that the present of a warrant does not make the action not autocratic. And you are disagreeing with a different idea (that the presence of a warrant doesn't matter at all), by saying it does matter, but in the opposite way -- if a warrant is present that indicates the state is losing checks and balances.
Point me to an article if I’m wrong, but I haven’t heard even a single credible rumor that these Stingrays aren’t being used for exactly what authorities say they are - trying to find particular individuals is a general area. Have you heard of whistleblower accounts or accidentally leaked details about large scale storage ordata mining of location data from Stingrays?
If your argument is simply that law enforcement agencies don’t have the right to conduct a dragnet when pursuing a fugitive murderer, as is the case here, you’re going to need something more persuasive than a rant against authoritarianism.
That is, a high pass rate could also indicate that it is a well functioning system with few spurious requests and none that are lacking required information.
Does requiring a warrant guarantee best behavior? No. But it does provide a solid path for accountability and a path to codify better rules, when abused.
This broad dragnet nature of Stingray collection has always been why it's been a major privacy issue. Like doing a wiretap by tapping the whole neighbourhood and filtering phone calls for a certain address.
[1] Bush 2000, and less directly but far more dangerously, by making Trump unprosecutable in the run-up to 2024.
Remember Kavanaugh's confirmation vote in 2018 was 50-48, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted against, Susan Collins for, Joe Manchin (D-WV) also for [0]. Susan Collins' reluctant-voice-of-moderation act has run out of steam, finally, probably decades overdue
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh_Supreme_Court_...
Which I suppose is another thing that was predicted but not acted upon: the establishment of political parties.
Maybe you missed it when you read the article?
[0] https://san.com/cc/exclusive-evidence-of-cell-phone-surveill...
They clearly don't care for legality, constitutionality, anything positive or good.
This man is no longer part of the administration. But not because he was fired for this blatant disregard for the judicial branch. It's because he was nominated to be a judge (and the Senate confirmed him).
If this government has not proven that they had one, you'd be mad to trust that they did.
There are no consequences to it for lying, or for not following the law, or not acting in good faith. It has a well-documented history of doing all three, and is headed by a convicted criminal.
The First Amendment precludes protected political speech from being used as a basis for such a search.
The Fourth Amendment further prohibits dragnet searches of indefinite groups of people, such as a protest, because it requires a warrant to "particularly describe" the "person or things to be seized". (The "Particularity Clause").
I fully agree with your comment in the different case, which is not this case, where government merely passively observes things happening in a public space. IMSI catchers are different; one way being, in that a Stingray *actively interacts with* a device, without authorization, by sending it corrupted packets. (So I understand). A second way being that it violates general social expectations of what's in "public" and what's in "private"; by analogy, if police used laser microphones to listen in on faraway conversations; or in public crowds, used terahertz radiation to look under people's clothes; those are non-public searches, any pedantic interpretations of physics notwithstanding.
Of course, the Fourth Amendment also has clauses against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but it's easy to see, from modern cases like Carpenter v. United States (2018) (which limited warrantless cellphone location tracking) why this could be perceived poorly.
But the Constitution tries to ensure that risk doesn’t come from government retaliation against lawful expression. I would ask why you're so keen to allow it.
Sure, that sounds bad. But also very different than a mob of masked protestors who feel entitled to anonymous protest.
Protestors should be proud to be there and shouldn't feel the need to hide their identities. Not in this country at least. For all the hysterical comparisons, this isn't Putin's Russia. They aren't just kidnapping random citizens and disappearing them for participating in a protest. On the other hand, during "peaceful protests" when people start destroying the city under cover of the protest, yeah, I do want those people to be arrested and tried.
even still, not everyone is a citizen and the government seems to believe that protesting is a reason to remove a greencard. Not everyone wants to spend a month incorrectly detained
We're less than a year into the administration: think it's a little bit early to be assuming that those abuses of power won't happen.
Well, the links above explain exactly why there is debate around whether or not protestors are entitled to anonymous protests.
> On the other hand, during "peaceful protests" when people start destroying the city under cover of the protest, yeah, I do want those people to be arrested and tried.
I agree, but I would not trade my constitutional rights for some small (or large) property damage, that happens very rarely. (The last few weekends saw hundreds of protests across the nation - how much looting or other did you see?)
Unfortunately, this country is full of people that fall prey to newsroom propaganda, become emotional, and would gladly trade away their rights. It's a shame that those decisions affect everyone else, as well.
The fourth amendment: unreasonable searches and seizures. This is an unreasonable search.
Also, protests aren't civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is civil disobedience. Protests are explicitly protected by the first amendment and you can protest all day long.
meh, this is a vague term so I have no opinion on whether observing who's at a protest based on the signals their phone sends out counts as a "search". Depends on the supreme court justices' random ideas in practice.
> aren't civil disobedience
> can protest all day long
If protesters aren't breaking any law, we have seen no evidence they have any reason to worry about anything being discussed here. I'm just saying that it's silly to insist on the ability to do so secretly. Masked mobs of anonymous "protestors" is a really bad thing to normalize roaming around and doing whatever they want. Even if most are just nice concerned citizens, you're creating a perfect environment for people who just want to destroy to do so with impunity.
Completely legal protests are met with unreasonable searches, seizures, and even violence all the time in the US. We saw it all the time with BLM. Yes, they need to worry about that.
Also,
> [...] if you disagree with me and think the government is fascist and thus can't be trusted not to throw you in prison just for saying things they don't like
this is happening:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/tourist-refused-entr...
edited for phrasing / completeness
The constitution is pretty silent afaik on whether random foreign nationals such as this tourist have any particular rights. Obviously summarily executing or imprisoning them would be a big no-no, but being asked lots of questions and thoroughly searched because they think you're a troublemaker is not uncommon. Being refused entry to a country that isn't yours and being home safe by the end of the day, is quite a few huge leaps away from being locked up in your own country for your speech.
Do I think that incident sounds like a stupid move by CBP if that is the whole story[1]? Yeah. But I disagree that it's proof we're in a fascist dictatorship.
[1] Is it also possible that the government agents didn't overhear him making some flippant comment that made him seem far more dangerous? For instance, "Yeah I can't believe I'm even coming here when that fascist Trump was elected. Wish that bullet hadn't missed." If he had said or done something to cause it to happen, you can bet he would have forgotten to mention it when he recounted his story to The Daily Star.
> "A post-scan analysis confirmed the detection of 574 IMSI-exposing messages."
That's roughly 574 unique protestors, give or take.
Full-on autocratic tyranny—this is also what Putin's oligarchs did to Ukranians at the Maidan Protests, in Kyiv in 2014. Used IMSI-catchers to assemble lists of everyone present, and intimidate them.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/ukraine-texting-euromai... ("How Did Ukraine’s Government Text Threats to Kiev’s EuroMaidan Protesters?" (2014)).