[advisedwang]

This is all under a warrant. Of course police can and do get location records from cell companies with a warrant, and it doesn't seem like a huge stretch for a warrant to require the cell company to "ping" to get the most quality location data.

The problem here is the judges granting the warrants.

Judges in Virginia are chosen by legislatures [1], which means they're accountable to political establishment who in turn have good political cover from being responsible for judicial actions.

Judicial oversight and judicial elections are needed.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Judicial_selection_in_Virginia

[cryptonector]

Warrants to get logged data are one thing.

Warrants to get a third party to take actions to make your devices do things that can be logged is another.

There is, at the very least, a very significant difference between the two cases. Whether we can all agree to pretend that there is non is certainly a political question.

[JumpCrisscross]

> judicial elections are needed

These aren’t a panacea.

I’ve helped get judges elected in Manhattan. The primaries swung by tens of votes in some cases, usually no more than a few hundred. A few clubs, or one large tenant association, could decide the vote. (Counterfactual: judicial elections attract disproportionately-informed voters if they happen off cycle and without party affiliations, which in the context of primaries, applies.)

[hailwren]

Judicial elections also directly introduce lobbying into the judicial branch. Successful judges now have to pay for their campaigns and more money tends to equal more success in elections.

[kingcharles]

How judges get picked is a huge issue that most of the population have no education in. Having them selected by the populace leads simply to judges that enormously punitive. The population as a whole believes that criminals should be destroyed/deleted from society, and the judges that can deliver that are the ones that get elected.

This generally means very-police-friendly judges that will issue warrants without any cause, and will deny any attempts to later fight the illegality. These judges then move up to the appeals courts and support the same policies by the friends they left behind in the lower courts.

[spacemanmatt]

I do prefer appointments for judges, and I prefer those appointments to expire after the elected official's term would end. I believe typically this is 4 years for elected and 6 for appointed.

[Threeve303]

The unfortunate reality is that law enforcement can track you 24/7 without a warrant. A warrant is only necessary if they use the location data against you in court. Otherwise, it is open season. The tech companies, etc have shown many times that there is a revolving door between advertisement/surveillence, and so on. Often they maintain very close relationships.

Even if it isn’t that bad now, and a warrant is absolutely required without proving the case in court, a warrant could still obtain historical data. So the end result is the same. We are being tracked all of the time and it is stored and sold, sometimes illegally.

Finally, consider the pratice of parallel construction in law enforcement and how easily this entire process can take away your basic constitutional rights.

Good luck proving any of this by the way. Gaslighting is becoming the norm when rights are violated.

[vkou]

> Judicial oversight and judicial elections are needed.

If you think judicial elections will produce less authoritarian judges, you probably fail to realize that most of the people who care deeply about electing judges are a tough-on-crime light-on-civics bloc.