"In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that police must obtain a search warrant to access an individual's cellphone location information. The 5-4 decision imposes new limits on law enforcement's ability to get at the increasing amount of data that private companies amass in the modern technological age."
"Cellphone providers routinely keep location information for customers to help improve service. And until now, the prevailing legal theory was that if an individual voluntarily shares his information with a third party — for instance, by signing up for cellphone service — police can get that information without a search warrant."
"Writing for the court majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that cellphone location information is a "near perfect" tool for government surveillance, analogous to an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. The writers of the Constitution, he said, would certainly have understood that an individual has a privacy interest in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour and even minute-to-minute records of his whereabouts — a privacy interest that requires the government to get a search warrant before gaining access to that information."
Today in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Perhaps most conspicuously, here's a mayor who annually asks the state for millions of dollars more in aid, partly on the argument that Albany, as the seat of state government, has added costs, particularly for public safety. Yet after securing $12 million in extra aid this year, the city turns around and bills people for expenses that state aid was supposed to cover?"
"The solution to the southern Democrats’ abuses of power was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was enacted after litigation on a case-by-case basis proved insufficient to curtail Fifteenth Amendment violations: State legislatures became adept at replacing unconstitutional laws with new ones that had a similar effect. In response, the 1965 act prohibited states from adopting practices or procedures that deny or abridge Americans’ right to vote. Crucially, the authors of the act recognized that obstructionist states could be singled out for extra scrutiny. Politicians in those states were prohibited from making arbitrary changes to voting rules."
"The same approach can remedy abuses by anti-gun states. The Second Amendment applies to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, which allows Congress to police the actions of wayward states “by appropriate legislation.” It’s true that Congress is limited to remedying or preventing unconstitutional actions, as the Supreme Court stressed in a 1997 religious-freedom case. But even in that case, a majority of the justices said Congress “must have wide latitude” in enacting laws to protect constitutional rights “despite the burdens those measures placed on the States.”
"A federal law could prohibit states from adopting practices or procedures that deny or abridge Americans’ Second Amendment rights, with obstructionist states singled out for extra scrutiny. The law should preempt unconstitutional state and local anti-gun laws, require concealed-carry reciprocity, and split up the Ninth Circuit (why should Idaho and Montana share a circuit with California and Hawaii?). Some of those proposals already have been advanced by advocacy groups including the Firearms Policy Coalition and the National Rifle Association."
"The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that President Donald Trump's budget plan would produce deficits of $9.5 trillion over the coming decade instead of the $7.2 trillion promised by the White House."
"As a real estate mogul in the 1980s, Donald Trump railed against Japanese economics. Now, to counter China, he is fatefully emulating them."