The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Fourth Amendment protects an individual’s right to privacy when it comes to their phone location data.The justices ruled 6–3 to send a Virginia bank robbery case back to the lower courts for review in light of its decision. In 2019, Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing a credit union after police saw him using his phone in the security camera footage of the bank. They then used a “geofence warrant,” which compels tech companies to provide law enforcement with data from all devices at a specific place and time, to identify Chatrie.Geofence warrants are regularly used, and let the government demand location data and records from anyone near a crime scene without needing to identify an individual target.Government lawyers argued that Chatrie did not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, since he had willingly shared his location with Google.But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for the majority, with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s liberals.“A cell-phone user is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties—which then can be freely passed on to the government—just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do,” Kagan wrote.Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred, writing, “even short-term monitoring” of a person’s physical movements can provide “a wealth of detail about [his] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”The ruling is a win for data privacy, and will make it harder for the federal government to access personal information stored in the cloud without getting a specific warrant.
By Flint Taylor This article was originally published by Truthout Prosecutions of anti-ICE and pro-Palestine protesters are part of a broad effort to crack down on dissent. In March of this year, in Fort Worth, Texas, nine demonstrators were convicted on a variety of different charges that ranged from providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy, […]
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed her conservative colleagues on Monday for making President Donald Trump more powerful than a king.The Supreme Court’s conservative majority scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—a high court precedent that allowed Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.In a scathing dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor warned that Trump had just become more powerful than the English monarch, whose Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”“The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President,” Sotomayor wrote. “In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision was constitutional because the country’s founding Framers had “‘never intended’ to give the President ‘the complete set of powers’ that the English Crown held, let alone more.”
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. The news about the news has been terrible over the last year: CBS News taken over by Bari Weiss; Jeff Bezos pushing The Washington Post opinion section to the right; CNN, The New York Times, and other outlets often choosing to downplay the radicalism of President Trump so they can portray themselves as neutral and objective; numerous local and national outlets laying off reporters. But The Guardian US is the rare positive news media story. The London-based paper is vastly expanding its audience and staff size in the United States. It’s covering Trump honestly and directly. Steve Sachs, managing director of The Guardian US, explains the paper’s strategy in the latest edition of Right Now. The paper’s core journalism is global, independent, and free, and he argues all three are essential.