Surveillance

Most posts on this site are about the Supreme Court taking a right away. This one isn’t — mostly. On June 29, 2026, the Court ruled that “geofence warrants,” the increasingly common police tactic of asking Google to hand over location data for every phone that passed near a crime scene, count as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That means police actually have to get a real warrant, based on real evidence connecting a real suspect to a real crime, before casting the net. It’s a genuine win for digital privacy. It’s also a 6-3 decision, which means three sitting justices were prepared to let the practice continue unchecked — and their reasoning is worth understanding, because it’s the same reasoning that could gut this protection the next time the facts are less sympathetic. ...

The Surveillance Grid You Never Voted For: Flock Cameras, ICE, and the Courts’ Failure to Catch Up Sometime in the past few years, a camera appeared on a pole near your home. You probably did not vote on it. Your city council may have approved a contract you never heard about. The company that makes the camera — a Georgia-based firm called Flock Safety — now operates an estimated 80,000 license plate readers across more than 5,000 communities in 49 states. And the data those cameras collect, recording every vehicle that passes with a timestamp and location, is being shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ...