It Could Happen Here - How the Supreme Court Changed Digital Privacy Rights

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Garrison talks with Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a new ruling on geofence warrants extending 4th amendment protections to location data and how it may impact police surveillance and digital privacy. Sources: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enforcements-use-of-geofence-warrant-was-a-search/ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/rayhunter-what-we-have-found-so-far https://natlawreview.com/article/your-location-data-now-your-ownSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It just came out. Jeremy, what did you just do? You just sit yourself up for failure. I've never heard you tell this story. I've never told this story. This must have been tucked deep, deep in the Jeremy Lynn file. My name is MC Jin. I'm excited to tell you about laugh, but not least.

I'll be chatting with guests from all walks of life about the power of the power of humor when it comes to facing difficult times. These will be conversations that remind us all, life is hard, laugh harder. Listen and laugh but not least with MCJent on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a show that is sometimes about surveillance, digital privacy, and all the ways that little black rectangle you keep in your pocket could be used against you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I am joined. joined by Cooper Quentin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist at the EFF or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Cooper, hello.

Hey, Gerson. Happy to be here again. Yes, always happy to have you on. And you will be especially useful today because we are going to be talking about geo-fencing. Because last week, the Supreme Court ruled that geofencing qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment. Now, before we get into what that means and why it's important. all very normal terms. Everybody will implicitly understand.

Before we do that, let's start to define some of our terms here. Starting off with what is geo-fencing? Yeah. So, geofense warrants, which are what this case is about, are warrants to a tech company, usually Google, that say give us all of the identity account IDs that had phones in, this set of geographic coordinates at this time period.

So they send that to Google. Google sends back a list of all of the accounts. They know usually anonymized at first, but that were in that geographic square from time A to time B. Which is actually not something that Google does anymore. They've recently taken step to no longer technically be able to respond to these Morins, which is a rare W for Google, but that is a GF. Friends warrant. That's what's at the heart of that. Yeah. And the goal is essentially to identify what phones and by extension, which people were

present around the time a crime was committed to narrow down a suspect from a very large pool of just random people in an area. Yes, exactly. So there's a couple ways you can think about this, right? If there was a protest and you want us to know their identity, of all the protesters, you could get a geofence warrant for the area of that protest for the time of the protest. Or if there was a bank robbery, which happens here, right? You get a geofence warrant for two locations you think the bank robber might have been in, and then you are able to narrow it down from which identities show up in both places. Right. And that's your list of primary suspects.

So the reason why we're talking about this today is because on Monday, June 29th, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court found that police getting access to location data through a geo-fence does constitute a quote-unquote search under the Fourth Amendment. And this finding could have really big impacts on digital privacy rights. The fact that geo-fencing is a Fourth Amendment search means that the practice of geo-fencing is subject to Fourth Amendment restrictions and protections. Now, there's also been some people, I think, maybe exaggerating certain aspects of this, ruling, because the court did not rule that geo-fence warrants are themselves unreasonable,

just like in general. That's right. That question is still going to be determined by the Fourth Circuit. But what the court did find here also should not be minimized. It also is pretty significant to quote from the majority, quote, an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information, even though for only a limited time and from a third-party tech company, unquote. We'll get into some of what that's referencing in terms of like third-party tech companies later. As you mentioned, this case does revolve around a bank robbery. And I want to get into some of the context of this because it also will help understand sort of the ongoing case

regarding the specific geoffence warrant that was used. So in 2019, Someone made off with almost $200,000 from a credit union, and the suspect was seen on their phone prior to the robbery. So police asked Google to hand over the location data for all cell phones or the devices in a 150 meter radius around the bank within an hour of that robbery. 19 anonymous users were first identified. Police then narrowed that down to nine users, who they got more information from, from Google.

They tracked their location for a longer period of time, before police then requested personally identifying information on three users, which they then used to arrest the suspect. So the suspect eventually pleaded guilty, but it was like a conditional plea because they were still challenging the evidence that was obtained through the geoffence warrant, citing a Fourth Amendment violation. That's right. Arguing that the warrant authorizing the location data search was invalid.

And this claim made its way through the district court to the appeals court to the Supreme Court. And we'll get into that in a bit. You already laid out some of the details of the specific geofence warrant that was used. It has this three-step process. First, this big pool, then a smaller pool, and then personal identifying information on the smallest pool. One thing that is very interesting to me is that the process for setting up this warrant was set up with the help of Google. They, like, worked together to make this process back when this was still, like an emerging investigative avenue, like five, six, seven years ago. Yeah, that's right. And also, as you've mentioned, Google's location history feature operates differently now.

The information that is being collected is stored on the user's phone. Yeah. They don't have the same type of access that they had back in 2019 in which this case emerges. That's right. they are no longer able to respond to the offense warrants, which is great. This does not mean they can't respond to other types of warrants, and this doesn't mean that other companies won't respond to the offense warrants. Yeah, I guess, do you want to discuss a few of the different ways in which location data is collected?

Yeah, certainly. So there's a couple of ways. Let's, I guess, sandbox this entirely just to cell phone location because we don't want to go off on attention about license plate readers or other location tracking mechanisms. But one of the big ways that people have been, that's kind of been on people's minds lately, is advertising location data. So this is like the product weblock, which is owned by this company Panlink, which I recently bought a contract with and several other enforcement law enforcement agencies that they have got a contract with. The Citizen Lab just put out a pretty great report about them.

But the way that they get their data is through a combination of advertising. APIs from applications, basically. So when an application on your phone wants to show an ad, first, it sends a request to what's called a real-time bidding database. And it sends a request with a unique ID for your phone called a mobile ad ID or made and some information about you, which can include your location. And then companies, any random company, you or I could set up a company to sit at these real-time bidding centers and just kind of gather all those data and never make any bids or that

data, never spend any money, just gather all that data of pairing people's mobile advertising 80s, whilst their location information. And this is exactly what Weblock does. So what they do is they sell this information to police. Police can then buy access to this information. And this is another thing that gets confused with geo-fencing a lot. But it's a different type of geo-fencing. they'll can sort of draw a circle around a specific area, and Weblock will show them all of the information they have about phones that have been in that area recently or during a specific time period. And that's not a geo-fence warrant.

That is a geo-fenced search of a database, which is essentially the same thing Google is doing on the back end, but there's no warrant involved in this case. But that's a very common method of tracking. The other way that they get data is just through codes that they embed in certain ad libraries that will get them that data sort of the same way, but without going through the real-time bidding process, but it's still data being given to them basically by ad libraries that they pay a bit of money for to the ad company or whatever.

In a little bit, we'll discuss some of the implications of the Supreme Court's findings, specifically on like the third party doctrine, but do you think that there's a possibility that the ruling in this case might be able to be used to put up challenges towards something like advertising location collection? Yeah, again, I'm not a lawyer. Legal strategy is quite outside my general domain of expertise,

but it certainly seems to me like there should be an opening here. the big loophole that law enforcement has been exploiting, locally we call it the data broker loophole, right? Yeah. It has been a problem for a while. There was a bill called the Fourth Amendment is not for sale act. It passed the House and then died in the Senate, unfortunately. It was proposed by Senator Juan Wyden in 2021.

That was an attempt to close this loophole. But given the wording of the, of the, opinion here, you know, specifically around people's location data being very, very much private data. You know, I think that there's a reasonable argument to bring a case to the Supreme Court about the sale specifically of cellular location data. Yeah. Because they did rule that the third party doctrine, which we can get into, does not apply to cellular location data. So that's, I mean, I think that's a pretty big point in favor of shutting down the loophole for location data. Unfortunately, it would not shut down the loophole for other data, but...

Yeah, it is frustrating how we have to kind of take this one step at a time, and that's, that is a sort of frustration that actually the Supreme Court voiced. Yeah, reformism is rough, man. This like case-by-case app-by-app approach does not actually make very much sense. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the honest, Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different

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Who's the problem? I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika starting on July 15th on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcast. Before we get into that, let's go back to the bank robber's initial challenge based on the Fourth Amendment. So a district court did agree that the search violated the Fourth Amendment, but it did not actually block the data from being permitted as evidence because the court found that the police officer's reliance on the data was not, quote, unquote, objectively unreasonable, allowing the, quote, good faith exemption to the exclusionary rule, unquote. This is basically because the technology was still new, and because there was few leads in this case, the district court found that the officer's use of this. was not necessarily unreasonable.

So they have this good faith exemption, which could become a problem later. Or might not, we'll see. Now, this was appealed to the Fourth Circuit, who went back and forth a bit, initially ruling to one that the geoffence did not even qualify as a search, so Warren wasn't needed in the first place.

Now, one judge dissented from this, arguing that the warrant issued was, quote, so lacking in particularity and probable cause that it was invalid, unquote. Now, this too could become important later on. The full Fourth Circuit panel reheard the case again, but were divided 7-7, half-ruling the warrant, violated the Fourth Amendment. But most justices still found that the exclusionary rules good faith exception applied in this case.

And that then leads us back to the Supreme Court. And the ruling last Monday only actually covers the Fourth Amendment aspect of the case. They're not ruling on the good faith exemption. and the Fourth Amendment question itself is split into two issues. Did the police conduct a search under the Fourth Amendment by acquiring location data from Google? And second, did the multi-step geoffence warrant issued in this case? Did that warrant make this search unreasonable? Now, the court only answered this first question.

Did it actually qualify as a search? And handed off the second part of the question to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, who will then also rule on the good faith exemption aspect of this case. To quote the majority, quote, we leave it to the Court of Appeals. The further question whether, given the warrant issued, the search here was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause, unquote. Justice Kagan then writes out instructions for the Fourth Circuit,

most of which relate just to the Fourth Amendment itself, saying that the Fourth Amendment protects against, quote, unquote, the unreasonable search and seizures of persons, houses, papers, and effects, and requires that warrants may only be issued upon probable cause and must particularly describe, quote, the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized, unquote. And this particularity requirements can be a big part of this case going forward. Because to issue a warrant, a judge must determine if there's a, quote, unquote,

fair probability that the evidence of a crime would be found, and that the search is of an appropriate scope. This is quoting from the majority again, quote, that it's carefully tailored to its injustifications and will not take on the character of the wide-ranging exploratory searches that the framers intended to prohibit, unquote. And this is the specific key issue with these geofence warrants, the fact that they cast this large dragonet

over just everyone in a certain area at a certain time. That's right. You're basically searching, you know, potentially fundraised, potentially thousands of people, right? If you imagine a geoffence warrant in downtown Manhattan or something, right? Like, you're treating everyone as a suspect right off the bat. And that's, I mean, that's the problem with any, any sort of mass surveillance, any sort of dragging that surveillance. But that's exactly what this is. And so, I mean, this is a good ruling by the Supreme Court, right? It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly good,

given this Supreme Court. Now, a lot of this ruling is based on a previous ruling, or it's built on a previous ruling from 2018, this case called Carpenter v. United States, which was also a very important ruling that affected the way police can gain access to cell phone location history through cell site towers. Yeah, so Carpenter ruled that police required a warrant

to get cell site location information, specifically historic cell site location information. CSLI is the acronym for that. CSLI is basically the police go to a phone company and say, tell us who was connected to these towers at this time, or tell us what towers this phone connected to. And the core rule that that was essentially equivalent to putting a ankle monitor was their specific language.

Yeah. On everybody in the U.S., right, but that was that fine-grained location data. And so they ruled that you needed a warrant to get that location data, which was a really excellent ruling. This case was brought to the court on the basis of that carpenter versus the United States ruling. And this, you know, reaffirmed and expanded. The big difference was that the information that blonde person had gotten from the phone companies in this case covered a larger amount of people.

but the Chattree case covered a much smaller area and a much smaller amount of people, but the court decided that this ruling still applied even in a smaller case, which is great. It's, you know, really it's narrowing it down, right? Which is how the Supreme Court works, right? You get a broad ruling that then sort of exceptions to that rule and like, you know, the limits of that end up being tested. Which brings us back to what we were saying before, right? So like the next thing, I think the next thing to test is does this,

that doesn't bring forward. I think this ruling applies to purchased data. Yeah. It seems like maybe they hinted to that a little bit, but it's, you know, it won't be clear until somebody actually brings that case to the Supreme Court. One of the most promising sentences in the ruling is, quote, a new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the government. Yeah.

And, I mean, that sort of reasoning. And there's actually a lot of it throughout the majority's ruling, but there's a lot of sentences like that that could be really, really useful going forward. Yeah. And like, you know, a carpenter was itself based on another surveillance case called United States versus Jones, which

covered another method of tracking physical location and movements. And this was through a, using a GPS to monitor a vehicle. Right. And that was a five-four ruling, so very close. Yeah. But in that case, the court found that GPS tracking does qualify the Fourth Amendment search because, quote-unquote, individuals have a

reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Right. And essentially, because of how difficult it was to, at the time, like, secretly monitor and track the movements of a vehicle, including on and off public roads, so including on private roads. Yep. It was then reasonable to expect a certain level of privacy because of how difficult this was.

But upon the proliferation of GPS trackers, the ease in which this type of government surveillance could be achieved, you know, changed dramatically. And that's the context in which Justice Kagan is writing this sentence, that a new technology did not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the government. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, I think that that's a really important sense for a lot of things, right? That's an important sentence for the fight against license plate readers and flock and the other companies in that industry. That's an important sentence for cellular location information, right?

Like, this is a great ruling, right? But it leaves open the whole issue, like I was saying, of being able to buy surveillance information, right? And, like, that's what enables license pay readers. That's what enables companies that surveil social media. That's what enables tools like weblock that's all location, information from ad tech. Right. And it does seem like they are hinting that maybe they, you know, that they are ready to rule on that. To me, it's a very, it's a very self-apparent argument.

Right. that just because they've bought something doesn't mean they should get around the war. The terrible part of this is that, you know, we will probably have to argue in technology in its own right. Unless, you know, we had a functioning congress and they were able to pass very popular.

Let's not get too ridiculous. Let's not, uh, let's keep things grounded in reality here. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to hope for more realistic goals. subtle anarchy. No, I mean, absolutely. It would be great to see some of this stuff just be enshrined. But there is a lot to look forward to considering this ruling. And I think to that point, before we close, let's talk about the third party doctrine specifically. What is the third party doctrine? So the third party doctrine is a doctrine in the U.S. law that states that people don't

have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information that they've given to a third party, a phone company or a bank or a tech company. Essentially, this is how historically law enforcement has gotten information from phone companies or from banks, etc., or tech companies without a warrant. And the heart of this ruling is that the justice has said that cellular location data being equivalent total surveillance to that of an ankle monitor, the third-party doctrine does not apply to cellular location data. Yeah, because like the third-party doctrine was set up, specifically in reference to, like,

the types of financial information that you will hand over to a bank. That's right. To do business at the bank, or by dialing a phone number, the phone company that knows what the phone number is. Right. Like those for the specific instances that establish third-party doctrine. And a third-party doctrine was not applied in Carpenter v.S. And so, Kagan wrote that for the very same reasons, it should not.

be applied to location history from tech companies. And even more specifically, because the types of information that location history from Google had access to was even more intimate and fine-tuned than what you could get from just picking a cell tower. That's right, because the location information from Google is based on not only your TPS, I mean, it is your TPS location, which is fairly accurate, but also the like triangulation of your location from Wi-Fi devices and Bluetooth devices around you. Whereas the location you get from CSLI, which was what was an issue in Carpenter, is going to depend on how dense cell towers are in the area you're in.

Because it's just mathematical equation of like what your signal strength is to your nearest three cell powers. And you can kind of triangulate somebody to a broader area based on that. And location history from Google at this point was tracking people's movements. like every two minutes and could operate on a longitude and latitude. They could not only just figure out where you were on a map, but if you were in a building,

what floor you were on that building. A much more fine-tuned look. Right, altitude as well. Yeah. Yeah. Part of what Carpenter found was that cell phone location information is quote-unquote quantitatively different

from telephone numbers and bank records. Yes. And so because of that finding, they applied that same logic to this case. And I want to read through two paragraphs that is similar to the line about how people's expectation of privacy should not be changed because of technological developments. I think there's two lines here that could become really important going forward in terms of

how we understand even just the notion of digital privacy. Quote, cell phone location information is not truly shared as one normally understands the term because cell phones and the services they provide are such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life, indispensable to participation in modern society, that a person could hardly help but generate a trail of location data. In no meaningful sense, the court thought, does that mean the person voluntarily exposes to any third party a comprehensive dossier of his physical movements?

So that's Justice Kagan, kind of combining the analysis for this specific case with the analysis for Carpenter. And then she goes on to write, quote, the government's app by app feature by feature method of granting Fourth Amendment protections misapprehends the very nature of modern cell phone use. Pretty much everything

a person does on a smartphone requires some kind of opt-in. The point of carrying cell phones is to use what's on them, as Carpenter said, to use the apps and the services they provide. That is what has become a pervasive and insistent, even indispensable part of daily life. And so that is

what Carpenter insulated from the third-party doctrine. Yeah. my short-term memory is terrible, so I've forgotten the exact wording. But the part where she's addressing how piecemeal it is, right? And how, like, this applies to all apps. This applies to all uses of this location data. Never shall this be subject to the third-party doctorate. Right.

I think that that is pretty damning for companies that are currently selling this data to long. It should be pretty damning anyway. Yeah. And like the idea that through simply using these devices, which are now necessary for modern life, using these does not mean that we're voluntarily giving this data over to companies and by extension, the government.

They don't just have free access to it because we are using the things that are necessary for daily life. If they want access to it, they have to go through the proper channels, which are laid out in the Fourth Amendment. Yes, you have to get a warrant at least. Yes. And so to close,

let's talk about kind of what this could mean going forward, right? Because the question of whether the particular geofence warrant used in this bank robbery case if that was reasonable or unreasonable now goes to the Fourth Circuit, who will determine if probable cause was established to support the scope of the search and if the warrant satisfied the particularity requirements, considering the fact that it cast a broad dragnet

over a whole area, rather than being, you know, fine-tuned to a specific suspect or even a group of suspects. Kagan wrote of the warrant, quote, how the officers would make their choices at the second and third steps, how they would pick the users subject to, more intense scrutiny, the warrant said very little, unquote. This is kind of part of like the instructions in which they are writing to the Fourth Circuit.

Now, the suspect, the bank robber suspect, compared the geo-offence warrant to a quote-unquote, unconstitutional general warrant, lacking in probable cause, with steps two and three of the warrant leaving, quote, too much authority to police officers and too little to the magistrate, unquote. So what that's saying is that in this like three-step warrant, when the police are able to determine who in the broad pool of people caught in the dragnet, who to investigate further, that choice was just up to police officers. That question was not laid out in front of a judge. A judge did not authorize that aspect of the search. That was just up to the discretion of officers. That is part of his argument that this was a constitutional violation. Now, of course,

that's not the government's tick. Right. The government claims that the information was quote-unquote particularized information from Google's database based on probable cause to believe that Google had the information that would help solve a crime. They also argue that the discretion given to officers in the execution of steps two and three of the warrant fell within the bounds of reasonable lists. So going forward, when the Fourth Circuit rules on the reasonableness or unreasonableness of this warrant, they will also consider what the district court and the Fourth Circuit themselves have previously ruled on.

They will reconsider the, quote-unquote, good faith examines, Yeah. The good faith exception is a doctrine in U.S. law that allows generally evidence obtained without a warrant is inadmissible in court. The good faith exception allows for evidence which was obtained with a faulty warrant where the law enforcement agents had reasonable cause to believe that it was a valid warrant. And they thought they were obtaining a lot of evidence, quote unquote, in good faith, with a valid warrant, that evidence can still be admissible in court, even if the warrant is found to be invalid. So that's what they're, that's what they'll be evaluating in this case.

And I mean, that's what they've already decided on and we'll have to decide on again. Yeah. Even if this warrant is invalid or even if this data is invalid because the second and third step didn't have a warrant associated with them. And they still be admissible in his case under good base exception. And the Supreme Court does have, like, instructions for how they want the Fourth Circuit to reevaluate that question, knowing that they've already ruled on it before. But they are instructing them based on, you know, the legal opinion that is outlined in the majority, that they do have to re-approach this question with these new insights from the Supreme Court. Canadian women are looking for more.

More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart And I'm Catherine Clark And in this podcast We interview Canada's most inspiring women Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers

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It's your girl Sam J And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game

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Starting your day can be tough. You wake up, maybe hit snooze, and then scroll on your phone for a while, checking your emails, all before even giving yourself the chance to really open your eyes and breathe. And I want to help you break that cycle. My name is Ryan Weiss and for the past 15 years, I've been an emotional intelligence coach and spiritual guide. And I'm here to share with you my new podcast, Waking Up with Ryan. Waking Up with Ryan is a daily audio video podcast to interrupt the inertia of your fear, your ego, and judgment. Here to help you connect with yourself before the

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I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika starting on July 15th on the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. There is, you know, evidence that rulings like this have impacted the way police operate surveillance, specifically by collecting information from Excel Towers. You are kind of the expert in cell site simulators. And there's, I think, reason to believe that the carpenter ruling also affected the way that cell site simulators were used, despite it not being the particular focus of that ruling.

If you want to kind of, as a very ending now, kind of discuss the Ray Hunter Project and, you know, how some previous rulings have, like, impacted the way that that type of surveillance has kind of fallen out of fashion. Yeah, for sure. So, solid-plice simulator is also known as stingrays or MC-catchers. These are fake cell towers that police set up to locate a specific person's cell phone, or I should say a specific cell phone, which is often associated with a specific person, with a very fine, granular level of detail. At EFF, I and some of my colleagues have created a product called Ray Hunter to get an idea of how

often self-sight simulators were being used in the U.S. Specifically, what we were concerned about was that law enforcement could use a cell site simulator to spy on and identify the people present at First Amendment protected activities. So find out who is at a protest, find out who is going to an abortion clinic, find out who is showing up at a mosque, right? So that was the big concern we had. was that they were being used for that instead of what police said they were using them for, which is man-cunts, basically, or identifying that somebody is in a specific location before SWAT team does rain on that house. So for the last year or so, we've had hundreds of people all over the country bringing these devices around with them to protests and just, you know, as they go about their daily lives, to find out sort of what the lay of the land is

and how often these are being used. And the reasoning for this is that we were getting the impression that a lot of activists seem to have the impression that self-size regulators were being used at every protest and that police were driving around with one of these in every car, right? And there was a lot of, I think, fear and uncertainty and doubt and sort of folk wisdom and misinformation going around. So we wanted to be able to get some real facts on the ground to clear it up.

And so over the last year, what we've seen is we have seen evidence of cell site simulators occasionally. What we have not seen is a preponderance of them. From what we're saying, they're not being used constantly all the time everywhere. They're being used much more rarely than most people think. and we haven't seen really hardly any evidence of them being used at protests. What we've seen is them being used kind of sometimes around major cities. We've seen them being used outside the U.S. a bit. But inside the U.S., we have not seen them being used for sort of the mass surveillance reason that we feared.

That has been backed up by looking at the warm. for salesized simulators that we've been able to get access to, been backed up by talking to people who are close with law enforcement and who, you know, who understand kind of how law enforcement is actually using these. What we're hearing and what we're seeing sort of evidence of is that cell size simulators are being used with warrants now because law enforcement by and large thinks that the carpenter ruling does apply to self-site simulators because that is cell site location information. It's the same type of data.

It is the same exact type of data, right? And so it makes sense that a warrant should apply to that as well. Before, when they figured a warrant didn't apply to this, right, because I don't know, I don't know what the mental gymnastics were there, right? I think it's possible that these were used a lot more. But now it seems like most law-inferred agencies have come to the conclusion that the federal government has come to the conclusion that this technology does require a warrant and that it's more useful or locating a specific person than identifying people in a specific area. I think in addition to the warrants, it makes technical sense because if you want to find the people who are in a specific area, cell site simulator is a expensive, cumbersome, complicated tool for doing that

when the alternatives are sending a geofance warrant to Google. Asking Google just to tell me, yeah. Asking Google to tell you. Or apping the phone company or a tower dump. Getting a warrant for a tower dump, which is where you ask them to tell you everybody that was connected to a specific tower. Yeah. at a specific period of time. That is something that is not addressed by any of these.

Tower dumps are still a thing you can get with a warrant, right? So that's an option. And then, of course, all of the other methods of non-cell phone-based surveillance, right? Face recognition is an option. License period is an option, right? So there are so many easier ways to get the identities of everybody in a specific area. It doesn't make sense to use those simulators for that, and that's what we're seeing. It seems like what they're being used for

for the vast majority of things is identifying that a specific person is in a specific house before a no-knock rate is executed. And no-knock raids are highly problematic. I am not a fan of the SWAT teams. There's a lot of issues there.

But if they're going to happen, like I guess, yeah, like, let's make sure we're raiding their right house so they can be sure of which dogs they're killing before they... I mean, yeah, I mean, swatting is become a huge harassment like tool for people just to deploy against someone that they don't like

or a influencer that they find annoying. And that that is a real issue as well. Cell flight simulators are not the biggest issue there, right? The existence of SWAT teams and how liberally they're used is the much bigger issue, I think. So based on how Carpenter seemingly affected the police's reticence to use cell site simulators, I think like we've discussed, there's hope that this new ruling might also be able to be applied to some other surveillance methods, but that will only really become clear over time. There's one particular that I'm also interested in is like keyword warrants, where police will just ask a tech company to like get information on all users who typed a specific thing into a search bar, right?

Right. And so there's aspects of this recent ruling that could possibly apply to something like that as well. But, you know, despite Kagan's annoyance at the, you know, app by app, way in which Fourth Amendment protections are granted, organizations like legal rights organizations, including like the EFF, you know, might still have to kind of approach this from an app-by-app basis to get like confirmation

that these things are subject to the Fourth Amendment. So it's something that we will see over time. Until and unless we can get comprehensive federal privacy law, which again is not, I'm not holding out hope for Congress to pass any privacy bills anytime soon. Not in the immediate future. But we can hope one day, right? And that is a real thing.

Same thing with data centers. This is a thing that I think people should try to build a mass movement around. Yeah, absolutely. It is happening to some degrees at the state level, right? California has a pretty good privacy law. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than the non-existent federal one. Montana became the first state to close the loophole allowing law enforcement to buy. buy data from

third parties, right? So it's, there is hope that at least at the state level we can try to start closing these loopholes you know, as a band-aid until the federal government maybe steps up in four to eight to

20 years. You know, we'll take that. You know, it is very rare to have and it could happen here episode that ends with there is some hope in general. It's very rare to have a conversation with me. that ends with anybody should be positively at all. True.

No, I'm sure we can have you want to talk about Pegasus to come us out again at some point. Absolutely. I have many ways to bum you out. But where can people find your work online if they want to hear more about Ray Hunter and all the research you do at EFF? Yeah, you can find me at Blue Sky.

I'm at Cooper Q.com on Blue Sky or Mastodon, if you're that flavor of Linux nerd. You can find me at Cooper Q at Mastow.hackers.com on Mastodon, or you can find me at EFF.org, of course, where I publish all of my writing. And that we highly recommend checking out our surveillance self-defense guides at sSD.eff.org. We have the pretty much the longest, the longest continuously updated technical self-defense guides that have ever existed. and they're really, really excellent resource. I think they're my favorite resource that we put out. So go check those out as well.

Thank you. Thank you. Turn off your phone. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Bill, why is my idea? Twitching. Does this mean I'm in perimenopause? Where's my phone? Juliana, maybe we can ask an actual human. Yes, because I have questions. And I bet you do too. Like, is it normal to sleep in separate bedrooms? We do that. And I still need to know why my poop's been green. We've got actual

people answering these exact questions. Listen to Bill and Juliana. The podcast. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning,

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Betrayal Weekly is back with brand new stories. From threatening text messages disturbing a small Midwestern town. It was from an unknown number. Who else is getting these messages? Why did it start with us? To long cons and stolen identities. Who lies about being this sick?

This was the last time I ever believed a word she said. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, my love. I'm Ryan Weiss, and for the past 15 years, I've been an emotional intelligence coach and a spiritual guide, and I'm sharing with you my new podcast, Waking Up with Ryan. Waking Up with Ryan is a daily audio video podcast, here to help you connect with yourself before the noise of the day takes over. So let's start our days together with a moment of calm that's just for you. Listen to waking up with Ryan on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.