Saturday, June 23, 2018

A Small Step in the Direction of Liberty



Emphasis on small and no thanks to "conservative" justices.

Police must get a search warrant before obtaining data showing the location of cellphone users, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.

“When the government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 5-4 opinion.

“Unlike the nosy neighbor who keeps an eye on comings and goings,” he wrote, the signal towers and processing centers that track cellphone users “are ever alert, and their memory is nearly infallible,” making analog-era precedents prosecutors cited to justify such warrantless searches all but obsolete.

Just to be clear, the "conservatives" on the bench were not the defenders against government surveillance.

"Conservative" justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch filed four separate dissents, sometimes joining each other.

-RW  

2 comments:

  1. No, but it's critical to elect GOP presidents, because who gets appointed to the Supreme Court makes a huge difference to our liberties...

    ReplyDelete
  2. You really think the Deep State give a crap about any of this?

    ReplyDelete