Whether an action has gotten a legal thumbs-up or not is of little relevance here.

I'd like to leave the question of why that's true as an exercise for the reader, but your comment makes it sound as if you have trouble with this concept, so let's be explicit - a state operating autocratically can, and often will, rubberstamp whatever it decides it wants to do.

Had a quick look for the numbers from FISA to give you an example of this. https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2013/06/fisa-co... says that they denied 11 requests for surveillance warrants out of 33,900 requests over 33 years of operation.

That's a pass rate of 99.07%!

So allow me to say - a warrant wouldn't have changed anything, they give them out like nothing.

In the article though, it does say: "ICE did not respond to requests for comment from SAN. It is not clear whether ICE or any other law enforcement agency obtained a warrant to use an IMSI catcher — commonly referred to as a “Stingray” — to conduct surveillance."

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Levitz 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Whether an action has gotten a legal thumbs-up or not is of little relevance here.

On the contrary, I don't think there's anything more relevant.

That such action can be legal speaks volumes about the state of what is legal and tolerated within the US. This, like pretty much everything about the current administration, is not explicitly about Trump, but something that has been cooking for at the very least the past two decades.

	▲	anecdatas 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's relevant in the sense of "is this an indicator of increasing autocracy" but not relevant in the sense of "does the presence of the warrant indicate this is ok". I think the parent poster is saying that the present of a warrant does not make the action not autocratic. And you are disagreeing with a different idea (that the presence of a warrant doesn't matter at all), by saying it does matter, but in the opposite way -- if a warrant is present that indicates the state is losing checks and balances.

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smcin 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

99.967%

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taeric 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean... I get paranoia, but this is arguing that an audit trail is not useful?

That is, a high pass rate could also indicate that it is a well functioning system with few spurious requests and none that are lacking required information.

Does requiring a warrant guarantee best behavior? No. But it does provide a solid path for accountability and a path to codify better rules, when abused.

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tiahura 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It seems like it would be hard to make pronouncements about the error rate without knowing the actual rate of unsupportable requests? Moreover, you’re referencing FISA warrants which are so unlike typical warrants that constructing arguments based on FISA practice is risky.

Point me to an article if I’m wrong, but I haven’t heard even a single credible rumor that these Stingrays aren’t being used for exactly what authorities say they are - trying to find particular individuals is a general area. Have you heard of whistleblower accounts or accidentally leaked details about large scale storage ordata mining of location data from Stingrays?

If your argument is simply that law enforcement agencies don’t have the right to conduct a dragnet when pursuing a fugitive murderer, as is the case here, you’re going to need something more persuasive than a rant against authoritarianism.