Posts Tagged warrant

Gun Ownership Is Not An Excuse For Fourth Amendment Violations

From Bearing Arms:

Today, however, a three-judge panel on the court got it absolutely right when it ruled that a Connecticut police officer isn’t entitled to qualified immunity after handcuffing, detaining, and conducting a warrantless search on a resident after he produced a valid handgun permit. 

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FISA Stopped By Just A Few Brave Republicans

From The Federalist:

Nineteen Congressional Republicans helped tank a procedural vote on Wednesday, preventing the House from advancing a bill — backed by “Republican” Speaker Mike Johnson — that would renew government spying on American citizens without a warrant.

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BoA Gave Up Customer Data Without A Warrant

From Open Source Defense:

As part of the oversight conducted by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the Committee and Select Subcommittee received testimony from retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill on February 7, 2023. Mr. Hill testified that Bank of America (BoA) provided the FBI — voluntarily and without any legal process — with a list of individuals who had made transactions in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area with a BoA credit or debit card between January 5 and January 7, 2021, and that individuals who had previously purchased a firearm with a BoA debit card or credit card were elevated to the top of the list regardless of when or where the purchase was made.

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Ring Will Not Automatically Cooperate With Police Requests

From Electronic Freedom Foundation:

Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police’s warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private, for-profit companies build special tools to allow law enforcement to more easily access companies’ users and their data—all of which ultimately undermine their customers’ trust.

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What To Do When Cops Are At Your Door

From The Civil Rights Lawyer:

The too-long-didn’t-watch answer is no. If police officers are on your private property, that changes things. Cops are trained on the requirement for reasonable suspicion – to develop some reasonable suspicion they can articulate, even if total B.S., and then that entitles them to forcibly demand identification from whomever they deem a suspect. That is generally how things work in public places – but not on private property, especially a home. 

According to the 1980 Supreme Court opinion in Payton v. New York, in order to legally arrest someone in a home, rather than in a public place, absent consent or exigent circumstances, police officers must have a warrant. 

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Colorado Court Rules Against 3 Month Long Surveillance

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, in a case called People v. Tafoya, that three months of warrantless continuous video surveillance outside a home by the police violated the Fourth Amendment. We, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Colorado, filed an amicus brief in the case.

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Police Can’t Use Biometrics To Unlock Phones

From Reason:

In an opinion published January 10, a federal magistrate judge in Oakland, California, ruled that the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination extend to phones equipped with biometric locks. Federal police can search a residence, the court ruled, but may not force anyone present during a search to hold their finger, thumb, iris, or other body part up against a phone to try to unlock it.

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Mobile Customer Locations Easily Accessible

From Motherboard:

Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don’t necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data.

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Supreme Court Chips Away At Fourth Amendment

From Rare.us:

On Monday, SCOTUS continued this assault on the Fourth Amendment. It concluded that even when the government admits a stop was illegal, it can still use that evidence to prosecute you.

Under Heien, the cops only had to prove reasonable ignorance of the law: “I didn’t realize stopping this person was illegal, but I found this evidence, so we should use it.”

Now, under Monday’s Utah v. Strieff, even that charade is no longer necessary. Police can simply say: “Yeah, that stop was illegal, but I found this evidence, so we should use it.”

This is all the more reason for citizens to familiarize themselves with jury nullification. You can learn more about it from the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA).

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Supreme Court to Rule on Drug Dogs

From Threat Level:

The home-sniff case, also arriving from the Florida Supreme Court, tests a decade-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent in which the justices ruled that police need a warrant to use thermal-imaging devices outside a house to detect marijuana-growing operations, saying it amounted to a search. In that case, the high court ruled in 2001 that “rapidly advancing technology” threatens the core of the Fourth Amendment “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

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