[mdoms]

Sounds like they're doing it with court-issued warrants with probable cause, so it's not as horrifying as the title makes it sound. It's "secret" to the suspect but it's not like the police department has taken it onto themselves to start a new cellphone tracking program.

[JumpCrisscross]

> with probable cause

It appears to be a lower standard; reasonable suspicion, perhaps.

[mdoms]

How does that appear? The article says,

> Officers simply have to attest in an affidavit that they have probable cause that the tracking data is “relevant to a crime that is being committed or has been committed.”

The term "reasonable suspicion" doesn't appear in the article at all.

[adgjlsfhk1]

2 big problems: "relavent to a crime" is a very low standard.

[JumpCrisscross]

Not a lawyer. Probable cause for a search warrant, to my understanding, means probable cause the target committed or abetted a crime. The target must be a suspect.

Probable cause for believing the target has information “relevant to a crime” sounds like something else, perhaps even lower than reasonable suspicion.

[cryptonector]

In this case not even. In this case the police indicated that surveilling the subject would help them find the dealer, but they did not indicate that they suspected the subject of being the dealer or even knowing the dealer. Or at least that was my takeaway from one reading, and I'm not going back for a second. Even if I failed at reading comprehension and recall, the important thing is not what happened in this case, but what happens generally, and I bet judges and magistrates routinely issue these warrants with weak or no probable cause.