老澳门开奖结果

WASHINGTON 鈥� The 老澳门开奖结果 and the 老澳门开奖结果 of Virginia, along with eight Federal Public Defender offices, filed an amicus brief on Friday in United States v. Chatrie, the first geofence search case to reach a federal court of appeals. In the brief, the 老澳门开奖结果 asserts that police should not be able to exploit the evidence they acquired from a geofence warrant, a novel and invasive surveillance technique that enables law enforcement to search for and locate unknown numbers of people in a large area without reason to believe they were engaged in criminal conduct.

Geofence warrants direct Google to hand over data about every cell phone or other mobile device that Google estimates was in a certain area. These warrants are increasingly common, but they raise serious questions under the Fourth Amendment because they are typically issued without police demonstrating reason to believe all the people who own those devices were involved in any crime.

This appeal comes after a federal judge in Virginia held that the geofence warrant in Mr. Chatrie鈥檚 case was overbroad and lacked probable cause for much of the data police obtained. The warrant sought information about all Google device or app users who were estimated to be within a 17.5-acre area surrounding the location of a bank robbery in Virginia.

The court found that the government鈥檚 search process left it to the officers and Google, and not to a judge, to decide what location and identifying information the company ultimately revealed, a clear departure from the magistrate鈥檚 prescribed role under the Fourth Amendment. However, the court refused to suppress the illegally-obtained evidence on the grounds that the 鈥済ood-faith exception鈥� to the exclusionary rule 鈥� which allows evidence to be admitted when police reasonably rely on a facially valid warrant 鈥� applied. 老澳门开奖结果鈥檚 amicus challenges this conclusion, arguing that defects in the warrant, including its effect on the privacy of people with no connection to the crime, should have been so obvious that it was not reasonable for police to rely on it.

The brief also highlights the U.S. government鈥檚 history of withholding information from judges about the capabilities and impacts of novel surveillance tools, and the importance of suppressing evidence from unconstitutional searches using those tools.

鈥淲hen seeking warrants, police shouldn鈥檛 be allowed to hide the privacy invasiveness of today鈥檚 surveillance tools from judges, and then say the evidence they get by using those tools shouldn鈥檛 be suppressed because the judge approved them,鈥� said Laura Moraff, Brennan Fellow with 老澳门开奖结果鈥檚 Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.