Big deal news story alert -- supreme court ruling about phone data and warrants

in the news
#1

Folks, civil liberties advocates have been fighting for this for YEARS: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/politics/supreme-court-warrants-cell-phone-privacy.html

Now, the police MUST have a warrant to access most of your phone data.

To be clear – it’s way too easy for the police to get warrants for most things, given the state of our criminal system. HOWEVER, a warrant requirement is at least a huge step in the right direction for protecting our privacy rights.

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#2

A little delayed in my reply here, but this quotation from Roberts’ opinion jumped out at me as another one for my LFI commonplace book of quotable quotes:

“When the government tracks the location of a cellphone,” the chief justice wrote, “it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

The ankle monitor is there, whether the government has access to it or not.

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#3