I always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified.
- FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails
- They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels
- They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels
- Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell
> 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.
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.
> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.
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.
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.
It is a little confusing, they ruled that the search was not legitimate, but this didn’t end up helping the defendant? I’m definitely missing an important nuance here but I’m not sure what it is…
Particularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.
I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince
When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
So very specifically I've historically read Roberts as a fairly moderate jurist. He has a true romanticism about the neutrality of the court and that it shouldn't be a political body. (This is ridiculous, but anyways.) This has changed as the court has reached a 6/3 bias. When the court was a 5/4, Roberts could swing to the center and bring the majority position with him. But now the far right wing doesn't need his help: The conservative wing can do a 5/4 even with his dissent. So you see Roberts bucking the conservative trend much less, maybe not because he agrees with the court but knows he can't push the outcome to the center.
The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.
She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.
As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.
With the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.
> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job.
They have repeatedly reduced Congressional powers, including today, where they basically said Congress can't setup genuinely independent agencies (in Slaughter). Or when they kneecapped the VRA.
Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.
> Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.
It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.
Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.
Congress fucks up as well. There's as pretty strong argument that "independence" from the executive power vested in the POTUS and legislative branch puts that power in a place not authorized anywhere in the constitution, and for good reason, as the design of the constitution intends elected office to have direct control over powers of congress and the executive.
Yeah, that's why we have the veto power; as a check on their power.
SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes.
Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.
I agree in general, but this is also why I say allowing authoritarianism through technicality. They know by punting to Congress, a body that is completely paralyzed, what the practical outcome of that ruling is.
IANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?
It’s raising the bar for doing these searches. Essentially saying some government investigator can’t go “oh well if we had this data we might find something interesting, so let’s get the data.” The court here is saying these geofenced searches smell a lot like such a fishing expedition hoping to find something interesting.
Rather you should have evidence that a specific person did a specific thing and need to conduct a search to find additional evidence of said person doing said thing.
The 4th amendment protects US persons from the government just doing generalized searches in hopes that it will turn up useful info. You have a right to privacy from the government unless the government can clear a high bar showing probable cause that you’ve done something wrong.
Google, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.
Yep. And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues. Feels like there's about to be some pure bullshit spewing from the right flank of this illegitimate court.
I'd dearly love to be wrong about this, but I'm not holding out hope. Until alito and thomas are impeached for unconstitutional rulings and bribery, there's nothing worth hoping for.
For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:
- identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks
- disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria
- determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers
- identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers
This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.
In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone.
Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.
rare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.
I always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified.
- FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails
- They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels
- They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels
- Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...
From https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...
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
I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.
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.
> I guess don't bring your phone to a bank robbery.
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.
>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
Proximity to a crime makes you a suspect even without the phone, right?
Only if it's known that you were ever there in the first place, and people that typically wouldn't ever be considered, like someone who is quietly visiting in the living room of someone who lives nearby, will fall under scrutiny when police are just getting the data of everyone in a certain radius.
I mean in this case it would also have helped not to have $100k in cash from a bank robbery laying around.
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe this data is persisted, unless they tore open the device to extract logs.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/amazon-releases-echo-dat...
This article is about audio recordings. There's no mention of Bluetooth nor any mention as to if there were any relevant recordings, which as I understand it are not stored on the device at all.
This smells like an urban myth.
I don't think it's implausible that an Echo would have an internal list of trusted Bluetooth devices and their last date of connectivity.
It is a little confusing, they ruled that the search was not legitimate, but this didn’t end up helping the defendant? I’m definitely missing an important nuance here but I’m not sure what it is…
> [E]ven if there had been a violation of the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement officials had acted in good faith.
How is this even remotely a possibility?
Because there are way too many existing precedents where "acting in good faith" was sufficient to overcome the Fruit of the poison tree doctrine.
It just means they were completely transparent with the court when getting the data, and believed themselves it was lawful.
What’s hard to believe about that? They clearly put some effort into minimising the collateral privacy intrusions.
Of course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.
She's not as big on some of the broader interpretations of the 4th amendment that more civil liberty minded justices would lend credence to.
Particularly when it comes to tech, she usually goes along party lines but she's been surprisingly independent in other areas. When it comes to the 4th she does heavily prioritize the sanctity of the home and property rights.
I have a pet theory that it’s difficult for her to convince the far right wing of the court to let her write the majority opinion, and that’s part of what is fueling these uncharacteristic or “independent” moments.
I am pretty sure the Chief Justice chooses who writes the opinion when he (or, one day, she) is in the majority, and if that's right, then Roberts is the only one she would have to convince
When the Court rules to the center, I think Roberts likes to take it himself or let a liberal Justice write it so it looks like the court is balanced and unified or something.
Roberts has lost control of his court and is desperately trying to make it appear legitimate.
Genuinely curious:
What does it mean for a Chief Justice to be in control of their court, and of course, for them to be out of control?
So very specifically I've historically read Roberts as a fairly moderate jurist. He has a true romanticism about the neutrality of the court and that it shouldn't be a political body. (This is ridiculous, but anyways.) This has changed as the court has reached a 6/3 bias. When the court was a 5/4, Roberts could swing to the center and bring the majority position with him. But now the far right wing doesn't need his help: The conservative wing can do a 5/4 even with his dissent. So you see Roberts bucking the conservative trend much less, maybe not because he agrees with the court but knows he can't push the outcome to the center.
The other aspect I think in play here is that the current executive branch pretty much just ignores every court order it doesn't like, and the Court can't enforce any ruling it makes, because that's the executive branch's job. I think Roberts knows if the Court pulls against Trump very hard, it could lead to a showdown where Trump just... does what he wants anyways, which would destroy the perceived power of the Court. I think Roberts has tried to dodge a lot of law and a lot of rulings to avoid clear positions on the President which he would, in turn, ignore.
She doesn’t have to convince the “far right wing”. As long as CJ Roberts (not generally regarded as in any “wing”) is in the majority, he can assign the opinion to her.
Ah, spare me the “balls and strikes” rhetoric, I haven’t been under a rock for the past decade.
Don't do this here.
As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.
With the exception of citizens vs united, I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job. I don't see how all this turns out well for normal people, but if it does, I think congress will have to be much stronger than it was within the federal government, and the federal government will have to be much weaker than it was. The structural problems are that the federal government doesn't want to be weaker, and congress people don't want to be stronger, because they have no term limits, so they don't want the power to rock the boat.
> I think most of the decisions of the "conservative" court have been along the lines that congress should do its job.
They have repeatedly reduced Congressional powers, including today, where they basically said Congress can't setup genuinely independent agencies (in Slaughter). Or when they kneecapped the VRA.
Some of them likely subscribe privately to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory.
Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive. It doesn't stop congress from directly exercising that power instead. It just says you can't play the fuck-fuck game where you pretend to create an agency in the executive branch but actually violate the constitution by trying to create a new branch.
> Slaughter determined that agencies congress had ceded to the executive branch had control of the executive.
The law Congress passed set rules requiring cause for a firing of an FTC commissioner.
It appears they now lack that power that they've had for almost a century.
Or Alito's new "history and tradition" test, invented out of whole cloth to take out abortion but now being applied to all sorts of things Congress does.
Statutes don't supersede the constitution and passing one doesn't create that power.
> Statutes don't supersede the constitution…
"We can make rules the President has to follow" does not supersede the Constitution.
In this case, it did, that's why SCOTUS ruled against it.
SCOTUS does not enjoy papal infallibility. They fuck up.
(Or act maliciously, as when Alito invented the new "history and tradition" test.)
Congress fucks up as well. There's as pretty strong argument that "independence" from the executive power vested in the POTUS and legislative branch puts that power in a place not authorized anywhere in the constitution, and for good reason, as the design of the constitution intends elected office to have direct control over powers of congress and the executive.
Yeah, that's why we have the veto power; as a check on their power.
SCOTUS has now given the executive retroactive uncheckable vetos. Yikes.
Reminder: On the SAME DAY, the SAME JUSTICE issued an opinion that the President can't fire a Federal Reserve member, in Cook, saying it was "out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference". You're asserting consistency that simply does not exist; the Court is starting with the desired ruling and working backwards from there.
I agree in general, but this is also why I say allowing authoritarianism through technicality. They know by punting to Congress, a body that is completely paralyzed, what the practical outcome of that ruling is.
IANAL, what are the practical implications of this? I assume the outcome is police would first need probable cause to suspect a specific person of a crime, and then get a warrant for that person's location. Am I wrong?
It’s raising the bar for doing these searches. Essentially saying some government investigator can’t go “oh well if we had this data we might find something interesting, so let’s get the data.” The court here is saying these geofenced searches smell a lot like such a fishing expedition hoping to find something interesting.
Rather you should have evidence that a specific person did a specific thing and need to conduct a search to find additional evidence of said person doing said thing.
The 4th amendment protects US persons from the government just doing generalized searches in hopes that it will turn up useful info. You have a right to privacy from the government unless the government can clear a high bar showing probable cause that you’ve done something wrong.
PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
Excellent, I wonder how this might impact things like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467712
It will offer this company and those similar to it the ability to increase shareholder value by selling amalgamated information to law enforcement.
Google, the company in the case in question, doesn't sell your data. That would be a big change for them to start, they like to keep it for themselves.
good. Of course the precise language of the ruling matters, but good.
Birthright citizenship decision coming tomorrow.
Yep. And this hypocritical bench has had a pattern of ruling sensibly on minor issues like this just before ruling with torturous rationalizations to strip rights from people on larger issues. Feels like there's about to be some pure bullshit spewing from the right flank of this illegitimate court. I'd dearly love to be wrong about this, but I'm not holding out hope. Until alito and thomas are impeached for unconstitutional rulings and bribery, there's nothing worth hoping for.
There's a 94% chance the EO is struck down on polymarket.
And what are the odds in Vegas? How is the opinion of a bunch of gamblers on polymarket relevant?
What if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?
For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:
- identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks
- disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria
- determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers
- identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers
In fairness, I mean, if the people collecting the data sell it on the open market, then you can't realistically expect it to be private.
The only solution in that case is to make it illegal to sell the data. And that's never gonna happen in the US.
This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.
In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone.
Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.
That is the loop hole IMO and that's how they will get around it.
rare scotus W, but i strongly suspect that because this data is "owned" by someone other than the people that generated it that said owners will simply choose to voluntarily cooperate with government inquiries 100% of the time. You can suppress information if the government unconstitutionally compels google to turn it over, but I don't believe that you as a defendant could push to exclude evidence if it was willingly turned over by a third party that had the right to have it.