Comment by majorchord

1 day ago

SCOTUS has already ruled that tracking people's movement over time without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

Until SCOTUS rules that parallel construction is a constitutional violation, the FBI is free to track everyone and build cases from illegal data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

  • well, once they do, kohberger and who knows how many others will be let loose on the public. sets up a hell of a bargaining chip for the feds to prevent it going to the supreme court.

    also makes you wonder if any of this would happen if the usage and post trial application of the death penalty were higher. less of a bargaining chip.

  • We told them to find probable cause, so they found a way to mine it.

Unfortunately, “SCOTUS previously declared this unconstitutional” doesn’t have quite the same sense of finality it used to these days.

  • It's really more of just polite suggestion these days, sadly. Except any time they vote against legalized abortion or minority issues. Then the rulings are rigidly enforced.

    • Legalized abortion needs to be a law, like the democrats promised for decades but never delivered. When the court invents rights then the court can just revoke it. Can't if it's a law.

      8 replies →

  • Scotus rulings (and the constitution itself) haven't been worth the paper they are written on since long before anyone on this site was born.

No, the court ruled that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone records. You're going to get to some weird and inoperative places if you try to generalize from jurisprudence like this. You do not generally have an established right to move without being observed in the US; the very fact that you're required to keep a clearly visible tracking device on your car or motorcycle shows that.

The current SCOTUS likely doesn't care about that.

Fascism is coming, and we're the slowly boiling frogs.

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