{"id":92238,"date":"2023-04-27T10:01:38","date_gmt":"2023-04-27T15:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=92238"},"modified":"2023-04-27T10:48:54","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T15:48:54","slug":"92238","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=92238","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Court Finds Geofence Warrants to be Unconstitutional<\/a><\/p>\n

As far as potential privacy violations at the hands of law enforcement go, the so-called geofencing stands out.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a dragnet-style type of mass surveillance that determines a geographical area (typically as a criminal investigation is in progress \u2014 but the authorities really could use it for anything) \u2014 and then all those who happened to be in those confines, at a given time, with their mobile device broadcasting their location and other personal data, are basically fair game for searches.<\/p>\n

Concerning and extremely sketchy \u2014 particularly without proper legal safeguards or even proper warrants \u2014 to say the least. And to say the most, straight up unconstitutional, on account of the Fourth Amendment (protecting from unlawful searches).<\/p>\n

The latter definition of the practice is what the California Court of Appeals has gone for when it recently ruled in the People v. Meza case, during the appeals stage of the proceedings.<\/p>\n

While it might sound logical to observers, the court\u2019s decision is still very significant \u2014 digital rights group EFF says \u2014 because it set a precedent, being the first time a US appellate court looked into a geofence warrant.<\/p>\n

\u201cDragnet\u201d means that instead of saying who the suspect is and going after them, their online accounts, etc., law enforcement agencies have reportedly been taking it upon themselves to go the easiest route \u2013 not to put too fine a point on it, but just \u201cdigitally round up everyone\u201d \u2013 and then decide if any of these people were involved in a crime.<\/p>\n

According to EFF \u2013 thanks to this vast, to say the least, database of everyone\u2019s location \u2013 it is mostly Google who is asked to go through that data to identify users in a \u201cgeofence\u201d delimited by law enforcement.<\/p>\n

The Court of Appeal had problems with all this. But all is not as good as it might seem.<\/p>\n

In the case at hand, the court found that the warrant that was operated under did not succeed in placing \u201cany meaningful restriction on the discretion of law enforcement officers to determine which accounts would be subject to further scrutiny or deanonymization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The court was also not happy, to say the least, that people could be identified \u201cwithin six large search areas without any particularized probable cause as to each person or their location.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Court Finds Geofence Warrants to be Unconstitutional As far as potential privacy violations at the hands of law enforcement go, the so-called geofencing stands out. It\u2019s a dragnet-style type of mass surveillance that determines a geographical area (typically as a criminal investigation is in progress \u2014 but the authorities really could use it for anything) … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,50,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-courts","category-goobermint","category-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92239,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92238\/revisions\/92239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}