>The FBI's role in the process is a condition of the Federal Communication Commission's equipment authorization issued to the Harris Corporation.
The result is that members of the public, judges, and defense attorneys are denied basic information about local cops' use of invasive surveillance gear that can sweep up sensitive location data about hundreds of peoples' cell phones. For example, when we sought information about Stingrays from the Brevard County, Florida, Sheriff's Office, they cited a non-disclosure agreement with a "federal agency" as a basis for withholding all records. When the ACLU of Arizona sued the Tucson Police Department for Stingray records, an FBI agent submitted a declaration invoking the FBI nondisclosure agreement as a reason to keep information secret.
Yeah it works really well
(I'm of the opinion they're a Fourth Amendment violation, and quite a few court cases are winding their way through the system. Quite a few judges have already ruled against their warrantless use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...)
I don't think that sentence refers to illegal abortion clinics; I think they're referring to state laws that attempt to punish out-of-state abortions (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-05-1...).
That said, a clinic is more like a house that burns down several times daily, which dramatically expands the scope of any such warrant.
And SCOTUS can knock them down, or make them irrelevant via qualified immunity.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-poli...
"The Reuters analysis supports Sotomayor’s assertion that the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police. Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did. The court’s acceptance rate for police appeals seeking immunity was three times its average acceptance rate for all appeals. For plaintiffs’ appeals, the acceptance rate was slightly below the court’s average."
"In the cases it accepts, the court nearly always decides in favor of police. The high court has also put its thumb on the scale by repeatedly tweaking the process. It has allowed police to request immunity before all evidence has been presented. And if police are denied immunity, they can appeal immediately – an option unavailable to most other litigants, who typically must wait until after a final judgment to appeal."
A fair point, but the controlling "document" isn't 200 years old. In fact, it's 46 years old[0] and is called the Third-Party Doctrine:
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant"
The tl;dr is that if you voluntarily give a third party (not the government and not you) information (e.g., web search requests), that information is not protected under the 4th Amendment.
As such, even though the police got a warrant, it wasn't necessary for them to do so unless Google balked at providing the information.
However, backdoor sunset clauses exist & the bill to reauthorize it have already been passed and sit on the back burner, as Trump threatened to veto it. I suppose when the sunset clause is no longer exploitable, they'll get the sitting POTUS's sig. More in TFA:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-215-expired-ye...