techdirt: Don’t Want To Be Part Of A Geofence Warrant Line-Up? You Have Options.

techdirt: Don’t Want To Be Part Of A Geofence Warrant Line-Up? You Have Options. by Tim Cushing (“Shira Ovide’s article for the Washington Post first details everything that’s extremely questionable about law enforcement’s reliance on geofence warrants. In a typical search warrant, police have a suspect in mind and ask for a judge’s approval to search their home, phone data and other potential evidence. Legal experts are generally fine with those targeted warrants to Google. In the large-scale search term and location warrants, police know a crime occurred but don’t know who might have committed it. They come up with what could be potential evidence — the location near a crime or a search term like ‘pipe bomb’ — and ask a judge to order Google to provide information on people who match those criteria. ‘That’s not the way criminal investigations are supposed to go,’ said Jumana Musa, director of the Fourth Amendment Center of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. That’s correct. Warrants are supposed to be particular (in the legal sense of the word) and supported by probable cause the search will turn up evidence of criminal activity.”)