I believe this is similar to how they nabbed the Washington State University murderer. The feds compelled Amazon to give them all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders and were able to correlate it to other devices their suspect's phone had been visible to.
You should also make sure not to bring your phone to anywhere where a nearby crime is happening because that's all it takes to make you a suspect and force you spend a bunch of money defending yourself. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
Hopefully rulings like this make that scenario a little less likely to happen, but it doesn't stop it entirely, it just means that the police need to spend 15 minutes to get a rubber-stamped warrant before they turn everyone within a few miles of crime into a suspect.
Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?
A one hour period and 150 meter radius of a bank surrounded by high-rises and public transit? no.
As we see in this case, the (likely) person in this case was actually found from the relatively small number of people who fit this criteria, so police were (likely) right to suspect these people.
The issue is not who the police may or may not suspect. it is about reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had obtained this exact same list of people who were near that bank for that time by a means that did not violate their reasonable expectation of privacy, then the evidence couldn't be challenged on that basis.
I’m saying that practically, being within a radius as the bird flies does not make you functionally “within the area” when there’s a huge z axis in a city.
When someone robs the retail of the ground floor of a high rise, there are many people who were right on top of the crime scene measured by lat/lon but were actually 10 minutes away by foot, hundreds of feet away in actual distance, and in no way aware it was even happening.
Two weeks of no leads and that no is gonna start looking an awful lot like a yes.
The system does not care about prosecuting criminals. It cares about prosecuting people for crimes. While it may prefer to prosecute criminals for their specific crimes that is by no means a hard requirement.
Exactly. It's all about consent of the governed. We need the government to prove that they've got a valid reason to take someone's freedom before we let them do it. That's also why jury nullification is so important. It's another check on government to make sure that we feel that the laws we're being held to and the punishments we'll face when they are broken are acceptable.
- Let's assume "reasonable doubt" is 0.1%, so you need to be 99.9% sure someone is guilty before voting them guilty
- Let's assume a random witness to a random crime has a 5% chance of getting some material fact wrong through no fault of their own
- Let's assume that if you are on trial, there is a 20% chance you are guilty, based on the assumption if you're guilty and know you're cooked you're more likely to plea out, so the people remaining at trial are the truly innocent, the guilty who think they can beat the case, and the guilty who are just rolling the dice.
In reality, witnesses are probably more than 95% accurate with material facts, especially when these are collected in isolation at different times, probably by different police officers.
And if we're being honest with ourselves, a lot more than 1 out of 5 people on trial are guilty of what they're being charged with. The bar for a DA to bring charges is very high, their entire careers are based on conviction rate.
As in, as long as I clean up really well afterward, I can pretty much do what I want?
If the argument is that forensic evidence decreases uncertainty, well, it certainly doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.
Convicting anyone of anything is a slippery slope. The only way to be truly sure is to never do it, ever.
the south is also known for putting people in prison without even having a charge. just a guilty result
There is no hard rule for physical evidence. If other evidence is enough to convince 12 jurors beyond a reasonable doubt, it could be very significant.
Why do you think many places would execute petty thieves? So few were caught generally speaking the punishment had to be severe.
The prosecution, regardless of unethical grandstanding, have a duty to prove the case without any resaonable doubt. They hold the burden of proof.
I would, of course, agree with them as physical evidence isn’t necessarily a requirement to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt. But I would certainly draw my own inference from their mendacity if they used those words.
Your duty as a juror is to make a determination of fact and apply the law as guided by the judge to reach a verdict. When the prosecutor gives you some blabber approaching instructions, that’s an attempt to influence you.
A suspect is under no obligation to prove their innocence but when it comes to circumstantial witness testimony, the suspect absolutely must do everything they can to fight the narrative.
same reason they are really out to disqualify jurors who know about jury nullification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
If someone commits a crime and ten people in the room say they were also in the room and that person did it, that shouldn't get thrown out because the suspect didn't leave a fingerprint.
The expectation of evidence makes its absence significant, but not definitive.
A lawyer at that point was a very good idea. Especially since all it takes is an arrest to cause you to lose your job and make it very difficult to get another one. It wasn't until after his lawyer got involved that the state attorney’s office contacted the police and told them this guy wasn't a likely suspect.
He would have used the same data Google already gave the police to win his case in court anyway, but it's a very good thing he managed to avoid having to deal with any of that before things went any farther.
Yes, everyone knows to steal a phone from someone you hate and bring that to the robbery. Right?
If you're going to commit a crime, don't suddenly turn off your phone if you don't have a history of doing so!
Yes, this stuff does happen to real people doing normal things.
To clarify, I'm not saying they used it against him in court (he didn't even have a trial). It did help in increasing their confidence in him as a suspect.
This smells like an urban myth.
> all the bluetooth MAC addresses that was seen by the Echo device in the home around the time of the murders
which is just not how this stuff works. I'd believe it if, say, debug-level logs were being recorded locally. But that would be an incredibly stupid way to burn through your flash storage.
But that's besides the point. A record of the last date of connectivity for trusted devices is an entirely different thing.
I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place. I'm not interested in speculation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Sidewalk
One of those purposes was to explicity use Echos for tracking purposes:
> Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/amazon-partners-with-tile-to...
> I'm interested in evidence that this type of data extraction took place.
That they obtained access to the Echo's internals via Amazon is evidence. It sounds like you want proof of a very particular bit of data being in it, which I'd guess the FBI etc. aren't going to provide here.
Huh? More and more I feel like I must not be thinking about the same Idaho murder case that y'all are talking about.
Parallel construction means they have an illegal bugging device in the courthouse bathroom, and use a conversation that you have with your attorney to identify a witness. Then they independently arrest the witness for something and pressure them to testify.
It's using illegally obtained evidence (like an NSA wiretap) to point the detectives in the right direction they would have otherwise never probabilistic-ly searched.
(mostly true -- for instance an officer can generally commit innumerable felonies as long as nothing they do violates your personal constitutional rights -- rarely is evidence thrown out because it was obtained in violation of a statute unless that statute includes a provision for exclusion, e.g. wiretapping laws)
This is you.
Charles Bocock, sex offender, attempted child rapist, caught with hard drives full of child sex abuse imagery.
How is this even remotely a possibility?
What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.
What's hard to believe is the data is apparently still allowed in the case. Like... how?
And there's something called the "good-faith exception" for unreasonable warrants: If you get a warrant where it's required (or in this case, where the government tried to argue it wasn't!), and a magistrate grants that warrant, it's a legal warrant so long as all participants were acting in good faith, believing their actions to be legal. Even if a court later finds that the warrant should not have been issued for one reason or another.
This is why Alito was grouchy during oral arguments and in his opinion that the Court took the case in the first place. The police got a warrant, acting in good faith. It allowed them to identify the criminal, who was later convicted. It wasn't clear that any decision by the court on the warrant requirement would have anything but an advisory effect, and SCOTUS doesn't do advisory opinions by longstanding tradition.
The reason why evidence obtained illegally is generally suppressed is to act as a deterrent to the Government. Even if individual officers were willing to risk their own punishment for illegal search or seizure (say, maybe they believe they are acting for the greater good), the evidence will generally be suppressed so that there is no rational gain from these illegal actions.
However, if the officers who obtained the evidence illegally were acting under good faith, then there is no deterrence obtained from suppressing the evidence they obtained. They did not act to illegally obtain evidence, in a way that they might be deterred from doing again if the evidence is suppressed - they thought they were collecting the evidence legally so they would do this again. So, in this case, there is no point in suppressing the evidence - no one is harmed by it being admitted (because, again, the Fourth Amendment doesn't promise you that illegally obtained evidence would not be used against you, it just promises that the Government will do all it can to avoid illegal search and seizure).
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, knowing that civil asset forfeiture is a thing.
You have to remember that evidence exclusion for a constitutional violation is a modern thing, and it is what's known as "judge made," e.g. it wasn't made by legislature, it was invented by the courts. (Miranda warnings are the same -- I remember one time-travel book I was reading where the guy went back to 19th century New York and was complaining about the police beating him and not reading him his rights)
So sometimes it can be kinda hand-wavy and bullshit, especially using the "good faith" exception which has been very over-used in the last decade or so, especially because of new technologies, which gives a get-out clause to the police unless the exact fact pattern of their "search" exactly matched some previous case that was solidified in appellate case law in their state or federal district, or by SCOTUS.
In fairness, this describes so much of US law, and is why you can't really understand much of the rules that apply to you without also understanding all of the cases in which those rules were applied in novel ways.
Is it good that things work like that here? I don't think so, but I haven't thought through all of the particulars of another system.
Also, the good faith exception is supposed to be relatively weak - it's supposed, at least originally, to only apply in cases where the officers performing the illegal action had no reasonable way of knowing that it is illegal; the original case is quite clear - a search was conducted in one state based on an out-of-state warrant, and that warrant itself was later deemed to have been improperly issued. I find it quite reasonable to say that the officers conducting the search had no reasonable way of knowing that this warrant was problematic. If the good faith doctrine was watered down so much that an "oops, I didn't know I was breaking the law" from an officer is enough, then the problem lies with these standards, not with the principle.
The original case is clear that that person's rights were violated. It certainly is reasonable for the officers to believe they could conduct a search in that case, so they should not have consequences. (Officers that do unreasonably violate rights should experience consequences, they currently don't.) But there's nothing in there curing the violation of rights.
It's so weird to me that this is possible. If that happened with other rights, it'd feel like, "oh, yeah, definitely these soldiers shouldn't have been allowed to live here. They do now, though, and will continue to. Sorry."
I mean... slippery slope? Just because they were sincere about it doesnt make it magically ok to use the illegal evidence.
In this case the crime is a bank robbery which isn’t victimless but most people think of as somewhat “victim-lite”. If the crime was the stranger rape of a little girl then the vast majority of people would have been outraged if the police had not obtained this warrant.
Seems like there’s no point in having the constitution if a violation of it has no effect.
The police could not have foreseen this ruling. It was not previously known that such warrants were unconstitutional. Now we know. Now judges are not to issue such warrants.
But if they do, the warrants' harvest of evidence will still not be poisoned, because good faith?
Aww look at that hangdog expression. They earned a treat. Go on, have some unconstitutional evidence.
Additional details:
> The information that Google provided to law enforcement officials came in three tranches. First, Google gave law enforcement officials a list of the 19 accounts (but without the names attached to those accounts) linked to devices that were within 150 meters of the bank during the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. Second, based on that list of 19 accounts, the government asked for additional information about nine accounts that were in the area during a two-hour period. At the third step, a detective asked for, and received, the names and information associated with three accounts – one of which was Chatrie’s.
> Relying on the location data, law enforcement officials obtained a warrant to search two residences linked to Chatrie, where they found almost $100,000 of the stolen cash, a gun, and demand notes.
> Prosecutors charged Chatrie with bank robbery. He asked the trial judge to bar prosecutors from using the evidence obtained as a result of the geofence warrant at his trial, arguing that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
> A federal district judge agreed that the warrant in Chatrie’s case did not have the kind of probable cause and specificity that the Fourth Amendment requires. However, she nonetheless allowed the prosecutors to use the evidence, reasoning that even if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
Link to ruling:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf