It's also a good demonstration how probable cause is supposed to work.

In this case, the subpoena probably looked something like "this email must have been sent by one of your guests, so give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy".

Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.

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JoshTriplett 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy

An entire guest list is still a broader fishing expedition than should normally be permitted. Warrants should be much more targeted than that. (Of course, many companies seem happy to give overly broad information without even requiring a warrant...)

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xboxnolifes 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A guest list on a single day seems pretty fine grained if you looking for someone who was there on that day.

Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.

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JoshTriplett 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You have the IP address and the time. For many hotels, that'd give you a specific room number and guest.

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zamadatix 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The IP address on hand is probably the hotel's public address used for NAT, especially in 2012. This means you'd need to have full NAT logs + source port + something like a captive portal setup that forces the user to identify the room to be able to tie (externalIp, sourcePort) to (user, room). The captive portal type isn't unheard of for hotels, even in 2012, but the NAT logs... it's no surprise they had to ask for the room list.

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mminer237 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

With IPv4 there's zero chance of that. At most, you could get all the people who were using [Gmail] around that time. With IPv6, mayyybe, but that assumes the hotel does as much data collection as possible and does it correctly.

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xboxnolifes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Assuming the hotel had customer specific login info and the person you are looking for was using it, sure.

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trogdor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In this case it was a warrant, and the Supreme Court’s ruling does not hold that the warrant violated the fourth amendment.

Edit: looks like I misunderstood what you were referring to by “this case”

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Natsu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Contrast with the geofence subpoena. "Hey maybe some small % of people carry a phone that might send its location to you, can we check if they did?" It's ludicrous.

In the case before SCOTUS, there was a witness who mentioned seeing the suspect in a particular area and that they were on their phone. So it's not a large inferential leap to say that call records would lead to evidence of who the witness saw in this particular case.

That said, Minnesota has an even broader right, so even this sort of warrant might not pass muster in states like that.