Police state: Geofencing warrants threaten people’s privacy

12/07/2022 / By Kevin Hughes

New troubling evidence has emerged about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the suspects in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol incident.

Almost 900 other criminal lawsuits of supposed rioters are still ongoing, including that of David Rhine.

Rhine’s lawyer is the first to present a potentially successful challenge to the geofencing warrant the FBI used to place some defendants inside the Capitol building during the incident.

A previous report found 45 federal criminal cases citing the warrant, which required Google to provide the FBI with data on devices using its location services inside a particular geographic area – in this case, in or very near the Capitol. Rhine’s case has revealed just how expansive the FBI’s request to Google really was.

Google originally listed 5,723 devices in response to the warrant, then reduced the tally to exclude Capitol staff and police as well as anyone who wasn’t “entirely within the geofence.”

The eventual list of identifying information turned over to the FBI had 1,535 names. It contained persons whose phones had either been turned off or put in airplane mode and “people who attempted to delete their location data” following the incident. (Related: Law enforcement agencies obtain private location data directly from Google to demonize innocent people as “crime suspects.”)

Rhine is technically not included in the 45 cases in which geofence data provided the initial identification of suspected rioters. But the FBI got a tip that he was at the incident, and the agents were able to discover surveillance footage showing Rhine inside the Capitol building through the geofencing warrant.

Florida man wrongfully accused of burglary because of geofence data

In 2020, geofence data that included a Florida man’s Runkeeper records got him wrongly accused of burglary. He avoided prosecution, but the ordeal cost him thousands of dollars.

A geofencing warrant permits law enforcement to work backward such as thinking that a crime was done around a specific place and time. This includes sweeping up location data for every person who was there and investigating each one of them.

It’s like a general warrant, which leaves to the discretion of executing officials the decision as to which persons should be arrested and which places should be searched. And general warrants are exactly what the Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent.

It’s easy to conjure scenarios where a geofence warrant would lead police straight to the guilty party with no collateral damage. If a person is murdered alone in his or her house in the wee hours and a geofencing warrant pops up one other person on the property at that moment, then that person is likely the killer.

But that’s not the only scenario in which a geofencing warrant might be employed. Once you consider a scenario with a larger group of people inside the fence, the risks begin to be obvious.

Beyond the constitutional objection, there’s the abrogation of privacy for everyone who isn’t guilty. A geofencing warrant gives the police a map of the movements of many innocent people’s phones.

That map is not certain to be accurate and it does not prove that the phone’s owner was the one making those movements. And even with complete accuracy and certainty, there’s no guarantee that authorities will interpret the map correctly.

According to American University law professor Andrew Ferguson, the “January 6 cases are going to be used to build a doctrine that will essentially enable police to find almost anyone with a cellphone or a smart device in ways that we, as a society, haven’t quite grasped yet.”

Follow PrivacyWatch.news for more news about geofencing warrants and other privacy rights issues.

Watch the video below to learn about the geo perimeter prison.

This video is from the Guardians in the Sky channel on Brighteon.com.