The problem here is the judges granting the warrants.
Judges in Virginia are chosen by legislatures [1], which means they're accountable to political establishment who in turn have good political cover from being responsible for judicial actions.
Judicial oversight and judicial elections are needed.
Warrants to get a third party to take actions to make your devices do things that can be logged is another.
There is, at the very least, a very significant difference between the two cases. Whether we can all agree to pretend that there is non is certainly a political question.
These aren’t a panacea.
I’ve helped get judges elected in Manhattan. The primaries swung by tens of votes in some cases, usually no more than a few hundred. A few clubs, or one large tenant association, could decide the vote. (Counterfactual: judicial elections attract disproportionately-informed voters if they happen off cycle and without party affiliations, which in the context of primaries, applies.)
Even if it isn’t that bad now, and a warrant is absolutely required without proving the case in court, a warrant could still obtain historical data. So the end result is the same. We are being tracked all of the time and it is stored and sold, sometimes illegally.
Finally, consider the pratice of parallel construction in law enforcement and how easily this entire process can take away your basic constitutional rights.
Good luck proving any of this by the way. Gaslighting is becoming the norm when rights are violated.
If you think judicial elections will produce less authoritarian judges, you probably fail to realize that most of the people who care deeply about electing judges are a tough-on-crime light-on-civics bloc.
On the flip side, if you want to commit major felonies, don’t take your phone!
It works with big providers albeit I feel like this parlour trick becomes tougher if your target is using a resell carrier like mint or cricket.
And if you run your own cellular service using OpenBSC you can try it out...
> RRLP is not just a theoretical feature specified in the GSM/3GPP specs. It is implemented by numerous high-end smartphones. There is no authentication of the network. There is no notification of the user. There is no way for the user to disable this [mis]feature.
> Impact: Public debate about this feature is needed. Operators probably need to consider working on some terms about how they use this feature in their privacy policy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160106074623/http://openbsc.os...
Reader can get the digits by simply copying them underneath.
How can someone miss this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_locati...
In any case, I would like my device to report whenever the network does something unusual, like request my location or put in a no-ring call. I wonder if you can make a pinephone or Android do that.
Next, some manner of heightened threshold for more than N consecutive tracking requests or M requests in a twelve-month period. Maybe probable cause? This will be harder, politically, particularly in a law & order cycle. (Maybe it could be accomplished through rulemaking at the FCC.)
I like the idea of motivating cell companies to be less of a pushover, but reducing cost does _directly_ reduce the disincentive to the police to make these requests.
> Next, some manner of heightened threshold for more than N consecutive tracking requests or M requests in a twelve-month period. Maybe probable cause?
These requests already have a warrant, so meet probable cause.
That seems like way too low of a bar.
The bar/basis to successfully receive a search warrant is hilaribad. It's pretty close to a rubber stamp. The courts just believe whatever crap the cops spew out.
Interpreted precisely, this sentence doesn't rule out the possibility that they use unlawful tools too.
But it also is just a statement about something else.
Edit: not sure the reason for the downvotes, this fact is useful context and first-hand
The lesser of either 20 over the speed limit or any speed over ~80~ 85 miles an hour (thanks jmisavage) in Virginia is a misdemeanor, and at least one auto journalist has been jailed in Virginia. https://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-from-my...
It's also the only state to prohibit radar detectors.
Should he have been sent to jail for it? I don't think so. But it's remarkable how acceptable that behavior seems to be.
Most of Virginia has 65 mph as the stated speed limit which usually drops to 55 mph around cities. There are stretches of I-95 and I-81 were the speed limit is 70 mph.
But anyone who drives here knows that the speed limit is generally considered the slowest you should go on the road. Speeding around here is common. And for anyone who lives in Richmond people run red lights all the time even in front of cops. We're all just practicing for the next Mad Max movie.
My friend once got a ticket for going 81mph downhill on highway 81 in the middle of nowhere southwest VA and had to trek out there for a court date.
I don’t ever miss living in Virginia
Which is arguably outside of the state’s jurisdiction. Only the FCC has the authority to regulate the airwaves and specifically transmitters and receivers.
I bet that cop’s radar gun has an FCC sticker on it.
What a hideous person.
Who drives so fast on country roads? Very selfish people who do not care about their own lives let alone the lives of others.
What a good punishment! Much better than a fine. We should use short prison sentences much more for the sorts of crimes rich privileged reprobates like this do.
Then the winging! It seems gaol is not pleasant. Does the writer want sympathy? None from me!
I so wish the officer had impounded the car and left these two people on the side of the road. The officer did not. But still the winging!
(Full disclosure: have never driven in the USA), but without wishing to sound like a know-all, how about sticking to the speed limit?
I've been dinged exactly twice for speeding since getting my licence almost exactly 30 years ago this month. No points in either case. It's not hard, honest. My wife might disagree, but her licence, her problem :)
For instance, I am on 24/7 GPS/cell tower surveillance because I am poor. The police regularly (3 times this week) come to my home, pull me out onto the street, cuff me up and arrest me because they believe (from the GPS data) that I am not in my home. Then they will have me stand on the street corner in handcuffs until the GPS matches what they see with their eyes.
Those of us who are under constant surveillance for our poverty have taken to installing cameras that record onto the cloud so that we can later prove in court we were where we said we were (not where the GPS thinks we are):
https://news.wttw.com/2022/03/16/designed-reduce-cook-county...
tl;dr: they do delete them, but Verizon said it has a 5 year retention
I know a thing or two about GDPR but it's still complex enough that I don't know what my rights / their obligations are in this case.
The best I could figure, my virtual operator was lying to me about not having my location data 24/7 recorded, but I'd be interested if anyone can tell me more.
Also even using these apps you are still on the cell network and there are methods for determining your phone number / IMSI. You wouldn't be immune to this type of tracking.
Sampling bias in the extreme.
Oooh, wait until they hear about CCPA... (but anyway, I'm sure the 'secret GPS pings' are just plain-old stealth SMS, and we're all better off not reading TFA in any case)
> I'm sure the 'secret GPS pings' are just plain-old stealth SMS
Worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28991641 (depending on the carrier)
And look who takes the cake again this time: "Sprint offered the cheapest prices to report locations back to law enforcement, charging a flat fee of $100 per month."
If there was a US law stating something similar for people connecting connecting to my French site from the US I would just smile and live on. I do not expect the CIA to kidnap me and bring me in front of a US court.
Or it’s just a low-effort CYA move recommended by a lawyer.
Actually Virginia has its own data privacy law now, modelled on CCPA.
It is only an alerting mechanism, nothing avoidance there (as far as I can read of their marketing papers go).
Also, separately, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS
This is frightening.
RFRA is an Act of Congress. Looking just the quote above, what SCOTUS found isn't a constitutional right but a statutory right, which means the statue can be amended or repealed, for example, and also that the statutory right is limited to whatever the statute says (or SCOTUS read in it). Without reading the rest of the opinion or the Act itself, I am probably justified in imagining that the right doesn't extend to violations of any constitutional rights so much as to violations of constitutional rights relevant to "religious freedom", which is mainly 1st Amendment rights, and maybe some others. I wonder, for example, whether RFRA would protect one's right to refuse a mandatory vaccine for religious reasons -- it might, though I don't have time to go read it (and related case-law) and find out (plus IANAL).
This…has always been the case? It’s a raison d’être for SCOTUS.
It appears to be a lower standard; reasonable suspicion, perhaps.
> Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is “relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed.”
The term "reasonable suspicion" doesn't appear in the article at all.
