Month: December 2022

“In my mind, what the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] is essentially doing is telling a diabetic who’s been on insulin for 20 years that they no longer need insulin and they should be cured. They just don’t understand what chronic pain is.”

That’s what Gretchen Elliott’s brother told Vice at his sister’s funeral last month. Gretchen and her husband Danny committed suicide because they could no longer endure a pain that doctors were terrified of treating. It was the most recent of the many dreadful outcomes that follow when cops practice medicine.

Danny had chronic, searing pain from an electrocution accident years earlier. For treatment, he and Gretchen, his caretaker, traveled regularly from their home in Georgia to a pain management physician in Beverly Hills, California, to receive pharmaceutical fentanyl. But on November 1, DEA agents suspended the Beverly Hills physician’s narcotics prescribing license, having decided that he was inappropriately prescribing painkillers. A week later, Danny and Gretchen killed themselves.

The DEA has not formally charged the physician, David Bockoff, who has been practicing medicine with a spotless record in California for 53 years. He was treating many “pain refugees” like Danny: patients with chronic pain, well-managed with opioids, whose previous physicians had either closed after a DEA visit or abruptly cut off their pain medication fearing the wrath of law enforcement.

Exactly one year before Danny and Gretchen ended their lives, Casonya Richardson-Slone, the widow of Brent Slone, won a wrongful death medical malpractice suit against her late husband’s pain clinic. He committed suicide after the clinic abruptly curtailed his pain medication.

In  “Cops Practicing Medicine,” a new paper for the Cato Institute, Trevor Burrus and I trace the history of law enforcement’s intrusion into the patient-doctor relationship, from the war on drugs’ earliest days—when Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914—to the present. By 2006, policymakers mistakenly attributed the overdose crisis to doctors “overprescribing” opioids. This formed the basis for an even more gigantic intrusion of federal and state power into the privacy of medical records, into patient-doctor confidentiality, and into the very ways doctors are allowed to use scientific and professional knowledge when practicing medicine.

Today, 38 states have laws on the books that limit the dosage and amount of pain relievers doctors can prescribe to their patients. Many of these laws have cast in stone the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s now-discredited 2016 Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. The guideline came under so much criticism from pharmacologists, clinicians, and academic physicians that the agency revised it this past November. No matter. The flawed 2016 guideline remains the basis of the prescribing laws in most states. Doctors face losing their licenses or, worse, jail time if they violate these laws. 

All 50 states maintain Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs to surveil all prescriptions issued and filled within the state. These primarily serve as law enforcement tools. In most states, police drug task forces use them to go on warrantless fishing expeditions, hoping to find a doctor to bust for “inappropriate prescribing” or a patient they can arrest for “doctor shopping.” These programs have not reduced the overdose rate. If anything, they have driven non-medical users who cannot obtain diverted prescription pain pills to more dangerous drugs in the black market, causing the overdose rate to increase.

With countless stories in the mainstream press about doctors arrested, sometimes with police bursting into their crowded waiting rooms, or having their licenses suspended for overprescribing prescription opioids—even though there is no legal definition of “overprescribing”—many doctors have been frightened into curtailing their patients’ use of pain medicine. It is becoming increasingly difficult for chronic pain sufferers to find doctors courageous enough to help them. Some refuse to see patients for pain altogether and refer them to pain management specialists, many of whom have long waits for appointments. Many doctors have come to view chronic pain patients through a suspicious and stigmatizing lens as drug-seeking addicts.

Some patients, in desperation, seek relief in the dangerous black market.  Some exasperated patients threaten their doctors. Tragically, some even murder their doctors. Also tragically, some resort to suicide.

Meanwhile, opioid-related overdose deaths reached a record high in 2021, exceeding 71,000, 89 percent of which involved illicit fentanyl. Despite a dramatic drop in opioid prescribing, deaths have soared.

According to government data, addiction to prescription pain relievers has been relatively stable at under one percent in this century. Chronic pain patients rarely become addicted to opioids. The overdose crisis is a prohibition-induced crisis. Neither the practice of medicine nor the act of self-medication belongs in the realm of the criminal legal system.

The post After a Crackdown on a Pain Clinic, a Tragic Double Suicide appeared first on Reason.com.

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The fifteenth episode (Apple Podcasts link here and Spotify link here) of Strangers on the Internet with co-host and psychologist Michelle Lange is a special one: In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Tinder Swindler celebrity victim Cecilie Fjellhøy.

See what the London-based Norwegian IT consultant has to say about fraudster Simon Leviev and the continued battles to bring him to justice, her and his current dating status, life after starring in Netflix’s most-watched documentary of all time, her experiences with British law enforcement, her anti-catfishing activism, and much, much more.

Want to know what Simon’s victims thought “was one of the questions [they] wanted explored in the documentary” that didn’t make it through? Plus, why did Cecilie and other victims keep being told “you can’t say that” by interviewers in the mainstream media about parts of their story they wanted out there? We asked, and she answered.

Some helpful background before listening to this episode, in addition to watching the Tinder Swindler Netflix documentary, is our episode on narcissism and past interview with two other catfishing victims (part 1 and part 2).

Don’t forget to hit “Follow” here so you can automatically get part 2 of our Cecilie Fjellhøy interview and our future episodes on your preferred platform!

The post "Strangers on the Internet" Podcast Ep. 15: Exclusive Interview with Tinder Swindler Victim Cecilie Fjellhøy appeared first on Reason.com.

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The person with the greatest claim to have ended Prohibition just might be Pauline Sabin. As we celebrate Repeal Day today, she deserves a toast.

As an upper-class divorcée who started a successful interior design business, Sabin was sure to be the subject of at least some controversy in early-20th-century America. But it was in politics that she really made her mark. Sabin believed women should be active within political parties and not confine themselves to causes viewed as exclusively the preserve of women. Thanks to her charm, her fundraising abilities, and her political skill, Sabin quickly became one of the most influential women in the GOP. With Henrietta Wells Livermore, she founded the Women’s National Republican Club (WRNC), became its first president, and rose to be the first woman on the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Sabin opposed the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that it had no clear definition of “equal rights” and that it threatened to eliminate protections for women in the workplace. But she fought for women to be represented equally in the upper echelons of politics.

Sabin initially supported Prohibition. But she tended to be skeptical about expanding federal power, and she often opposed paternalistic legislation. (In 1920, when the Lord’s Day Alliance was opposing the playing of movies on Sundays and pushing for federal censorship, Sabin said: “I’m heartily opposed to any legislation that will deprive the public of a wholesome entertainment on Sunday.”) As Prohibition failed to deliver on its promises, Sabin became increasingly disenchanted. She finally endorsed Repeal in a 1928 article titled “I Change My Mind on Prohibition.”

While Sabin was not enthusiastic about the Republican presidential nominee that year, Herbert Hoover, she was encouraged by Hoover’s promise to appoint a commission to study Prohibition. But after Hoover’s inaugural address, in which he promised to enforce the law against alcohol, she decided she’d had enough and resigned from the RNC. She then met with 11 other women to lay the groundwork for founding the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR).

Speaking at a luncheon in her honor a month after Hoover’s inauguration, Sabin channeled the spirit of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “To tell citizens what they must or must not do in their strictly personal conduct as long as public safety is not affected is a function which government should not attempt,” she said. “It is the age-old effort of the fanatic which has been behind every invasion of personal liberty in the past.” Later that year, she told the National Civic Federation: “We have exchanged the government of the people for the government of and by the Methodist Board of Morals.”

Sabin’s challenge was making Repeal respectable. Other reform organizations were constantly under attack, as when prohibitionists denounced the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment as a cabal of wealthy businessmen who wanted to see the return of alcohol revenues. She especially wanted to counter the narrative that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) spoke for American womanhood. On February 12, 1930, she appeared before Congress “to refute the contention that is often made by dry organizations that all the women of America favor national prohibition.” She spoke scathingly of politicians who were “notoriously wet in their personal conducts, but continue to vote under the whiplash of that political cabal called the Anti-Saloon League.”

Sabin’s rhetoric borrowed heavily from the prohibitionists, but with the script flipped. Repeal, not Prohibition, would safeguard the home from crime, drink, and lawlessness. The WONPR declined to base its central case for Repeal on the importance of individual freedom—the more libertarian approach favored by Louise Gross, leader of the Molly Pitcher Club. But this doesn’t mean Sabin didn’t share these ideas.

“Some of Sabin’s views may have been closer to those of Louise Gross than was politically convenient for Sabin to admit,” the historian Kenneth D. Rose wrote in his 1996 book American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition. “Both before she assumed her WONPR duties and after she completed them, Sabin revealed herself to be, if not a libertarian, at least a person with well-developed distrust of government intrusion that went beyond any concerns over child welfare.”

Sabin took the fight for Repeal to the strongholds of Prohibition in the Midwest and the Deep South. Her social standing and political experience guaranteed her spots on the front pages, in the society pages, and in the newsreels. WONPR’s size exploded. Sometimes referred to as “Sabines,” its members lobbied lawmakers and made waves in the press. Critics accused the group of being a collection of wealthy socialites like Sabin, but in fact 37 percent of the Sabines were housewives, 19 percent were clerical workers, and 15 percent were industrial workers.

The WONPR demanded that political candidates state their views on Prohibition, telling its members to vote only for those supporting reform, regardless of party. Reporting on the WONPR’s second convention in 1931, Sabin wrote that they would enlist “an army of women so great that its backing will give courage to the most weak-kneed and hypocritical Congressman to vote as he drinks.” A key plank in the WONPR’s platform was to reject any compromises that would still leave the issue in the hands of Congress, making it vulnerable to future political swings.

“When Mrs. Sabin formed her Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform it gathered members so fast that within an incredibly short time it has more of them than all of the W.C.T.U.’s and other such dry organizations put together,” the anti-Prohibition activist William H. Stayton told the journalist H.L. Mencken. “This alarmed the politicians and they began to jump. They saw that the women were actually more dangerous to them than the men.”

Sabin’s final abandonment of partisanship came with her endorsement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. “It has been said that the Democratic candidate is a very recent convert to the cause of Repeal because of political expediency,” said Sabin. “It cannot be said up to this date, the Republican candidate is a convert to Repeal for any reason.”

In October 1933, with victory in sight, Sabin suffered a devastating blow when her second husband, Charles H. Sabin, died at their Long Island estate. Before his death, Pauline promised Charles that she’d continue the fight for reform. When Repeal came, the WONPR helped ensure that there was no fudging on the issue and that the states, not the federal government, would regulate the sale of alcohol.

Recent years have seen some attempts to rehabilitate Prohibition and its supporters. When revising whether the drys have been unfairly caricatured and the wets overly lionized, contrast Wayne Wheeler, head of the ASL, with Sabin. Wheeler cheered the government’s poisoning of the industrial alcohol supply, which was being used to make bootleg liquor. “The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide,” Wheeler said. He added: “To root out a bad habit costs many lives and long years of effort.” Thousands died thanks to government-contaminated alcohol.

Sabin didn’t rest after her victory. Though she initially supported Roosevelt because of his stance on Prohibition, she soon turned her energies to fighting his New Deal policies by joining the American Liberty League.

She married again in 1936, and she served as the Red Cross’s director of volunteer special services both before and during World War II. In her later years, Sabin advised on the interior decoration of President Harry Truman’s White House and wrote letters to The Washington Post expressing concern over the national debt and warning against McCarthyism. She died on December 27, 1955. Anyone who values liberty both for themselves and for others raise a glass on Repeal Day to Pauline Sabin.

The post The Woman Who Spearheaded Prohibition's Repeal appeared first on Reason.com.

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Today the Supreme Court heard oral argument in 303 Creative v. Elenis. I was pleased that Justice Alito found useful the amicus brief filed by the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty. Around the 1:07:02 mark, he referenced our brief, and posed a few hypothetical questions that we raised.

Here is the audio:

And here are the hypos from our brief:

Consider another hypothetical closer to the facts in 303 Creative. A Jewish man and a Jewish woman, who are engaged to be married, ask a Jewish website designer to build a website to celebrate their nuptials. No problem. Mazal tov! Another Jewish man and a Christian woman, who are engaged to be married, ask a Jewish website designer to build a website to celebrate their nuptials. Big problem. Don’t stomp the glass. Many Jews consider intermarriage an existential threat to the future of Judaism.[1] Under the 10th Circuit’s ruling, the Jewish artisan would be compelled to voice support for an existential threat to the future of his faith.

Let’s turn from marriage to adultery. An unmarried Jewish person asks a Jewish photographer to take a photograph for his JDate dating profile. Swipe right for the shidduch.[2] Next, a married Jewish person asks a Jewish photographer to take a photograph for his AshleyMadison.com dating profile.[3] Swipe left for this shanda.[4] After all, adultery is a violation of the Seventh Commandment.[5]

In each of these examples, a Jewish artist would be compelled to betray his conscience. Yet, the Tenth Circuit would force the Jewish artisans to lend their voices to these breaches of faith.

[1] Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, What’s Wrong With Intermarriage, Chabad.org, https://bit.ly/3wPo8fz (last visited May 30, 2022) (describing intermarriage as a “calamit[y]” that “concerns the whole Jewish people”), Rabbi Steven Weil, After Pew: What Will It Take to Save American Jewry, JewishAction.com, https://ift.tt/gCuI98p (last visited May 30, 2022) (noting that an “astoundingly high intermarriage rate” is one reason why “American Jewry is on a train speeding headlong into self-destruction”).

[2] In Jewish circles, the word shidduch describes the dating process that (hopefully) leads to a Jewish marriage.

[3] Scott Cameron, The Infidelity App, NPR.org,  https://ift.tt/rkiPR8t (Last visited May 30, 2022).

[4] Shanda is a Yiddish word to describe something shameful.

[5] The Ten Commandments, Chabad.org, https://bit.ly/3LQZteT (Last visited May 30, 2022).

The post Justice Alito Asks Questions in <i>303 Creative</i> from Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty Amicus Brief appeared first on Reason.com.

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Amid the glut of retrospectives on the five-year anniversary of #MeToo, the where-are-they-now rundowns of accused men and movement icons alike, a sense emerges that the #MeToo movement itself has finally transformed from a cause du jour to grist for the cultural mill. What it gives us now isn’t news but narratives: the Pulitzer-winning reporting, the bestselling books based on the prize-winning reporting, the movies based on the books. 

The release this month of She Said, a dramatized retelling of how New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor exposed Harvey Weinstein for the predator he is, has a celebratory feel to it, a satisfied look back by the movement’s documentarians at a job well done. It’s also impossible not to notice the film’s end-of-year release date, always a sign of a hopeful contender for the Academy Awards.

But there are loose ends still to be tied. And on this front, the remarkable reporting on Junot Diaz published late last month by Ben Smith of Semafor stands out, revealing not just the movement’s far-reaching impact but its limitations and unintended consequences. Diaz was never the movement’s greatest monster, his cancellation never one of its biggest victories. But the story of what happened to him has a “now it can be told” feeling about it, even as some angry commentators continue to insist it should not, and can never, be told. 

It all seemed righteous enough at the time, when the movement was at the height of its momentum and any allegedly bad man could not be defenestrated quickly enough: Diaz, a Pulitzer-winning novelist and one of the most celebrated writers in the contemporary American canon, was accused of one “forcible kiss” and two misogynistic tirades, all of which was immediately shorthanded per #MeToo best practices to the nefarious-sounding “pattern of predatory behavior.” 

His swift departure from the literary public sphere seemed like confirmation that a predator was what he was, although if you had been paying close attention, you might have noticed that he held onto his job at MIT even as literary activists on Twitter eagerly announced the removal of his books from their shelves and their classroom syllabi. 

The incompleteness of Diaz’s ruination was the first sign of the truth that Smith’s reporting would reveal: an independent investigation found that the charges against him ran from unsubstantiated to outright false. An audio recording of one of the so-called tirades revealed it to have been, at best, mild disagreement; people present for the other one said they didn’t remember it happening the way the accuser said. And the forcible kiss? A peck on the cheek. 

If some of those who celebrated Diaz’s ostracization from public life felt chagrined to learn that they’d been misled, it was not readily apparent in the response to the piece. “I hope the sexual harasser is at least paying you for the nice PR,” read one representative reply on Twitter. 

It’s fair, though, to ask how much said so-called P.R. will be worth for a man whose innocence of the charges against him has been a knowable fact for years, yet has done nothing to restore his reputation. The fact that Diaz didn’t sexually harass anyone, that an independent investigative body spent months determining that he didn’t, doesn’t matter. He is, per the narrative, a harasser. 

As much as the #MeToo movement revealed about the true and terrible nature of men, it also revealed something about women. Their courage and resilience in the face of oppression, certainly, but also their opportunism, their skill at turning interpersonal conflict into a clout-seeking exercise. The prospect of litigating every disappointing encounter, every heartbreak or act of disrespect, in a trial by internet, quickly resulted in the stunning spectacle of women voluntarily surrendering every last shred of their sexual agency for the promise of seeing some jerk get his. 

There was the woman who had what could be most accurately described as a bad date with Aziz Ansari: In addition to Ansari’s sexual overzealousness, much was made of the fact that she was served white wine, when she prefers red. There was the one who equated rape with her boyfriend’s insistence that she wear a certain style of eye makeup. There were the Diaz accusers: the one who described a heated dinner party conversation as “verbal sexual assault,” the one who described herself as “a wide-eyed 26-year-old” when the author “cornered” her and kissed her cheek. 

And while the #MeToo narrative tells us that men are monsters, it’s less sure what to make of women. Are they the competent professionals of She Said? The tragic victims of The Hunting Ground? The broken but badass revenge-seekers of Promising Young Woman, using feminine wiles to dish up a well-deserved comeuppance? 

Or maybe they’re best represented by the reluctant hero of the horror film Barbarian, one of the most interesting cultural properties to be born out of the miasma of #MeToo—and, sad to say, a far better-made and more watchable film than She Said. There are many different kinds of monsters in this story, but also an unusual sort of hero: the final girl, Tess, whose fatal flaw is that she’s just too good, too nice, too willing to believe in the inherent goodness of people. We know, though she doesn’t, that a sleazy Weinstein-esque character played by Justin Long is an irredeemable baddie: Asked by a friend what really happened between him and a woman who accused him of rape, he equivocates: “She took a little convincing.” The fact that Tess tries to save this man’s life is to her credit, but from a #MeToo perspective, it makes her a useful idiot for the enemy: it is her decency standing in the way of the narrative’s satisfaction, preventing this monster from getting what he deserves—what he really deserves.

In real life, of course, there’s no danger of this. With the exception of Bill Cosby, who was convicted but released due to prosecutorial overreach, the worst of the #MeToo monsters have not been spared. Some, like Weinstein, will deservedly die in prison. Others have been so thoroughly toppled that they’ll never again hold a position of power that they can abuse. 

And yet, looking back over the lists of canceled men, it’s striking how few cases rise to the level of a Weinstein, how few of them even come close. The net cast by the movement ultimately caught far more men like Diaz: guys who weren’t formidable serial predators but ordinary jerks, possessed of just enough name recognition to make it worth something to target them, but so little power that knocking them down took hardly any effort at all. Men whose behavior would have been written off as merely annoying or tacky or impolite, if not for the heady influence of a moment in which it was not just easy but a little bit fun to cast these moments as representative of systemic injustice, of the trauma inflicted on women for centuries by the careless, callous patriarchy. 

There was, for a time, an almost party-like atmosphere surrounding the emergence of each new allegation, the humiliation of each accused man. One recent #MeToo retrospective in New York about the “Shitty Media Men list,” a crowdsourced Google spreadsheet gathering allegations of everything from rape and violent assault to creepy DMs and awkward lunch invitations, offered up a remarkable quote from one of the women involved in making it: “It was the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

It’s rare to see anyone say so quite so out in the open, but this is the thing: It was fun. It’s a feature, not a bug, that most #MeTooings became such public spectacles, fueled by an energy that less resembled the grueling work of activism than it did the malicious glee of a bunch of high school kids scribbling in a burn book.

Five years after the movement’s inception, we don’t want to look too closely at that part. Better to self-mythologize with prestige dramas about intrepid journalists, thrillers about victims getting revenge, even horror that affirms the need to be maximally merciless to the monsters among us—and to criticize in the most punishing terms anyone who dares suggest that maybe, in the excitement of seeing bad men knocked down like dominoes, we became a bit monstrous ourselves. 

The post Are We Entering an Era of #MeToo Reckoning? appeared first on Reason.com.

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The House committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021, is nearly finished with its work, and a jury convicted a key figure in the attack on the Capitol of seditious conspiracy this week. Nearly 900 other criminal prosecutions of alleged rioters remain underway, and one case has shed troubling new light on how the FBI investigated these defendants.

The suspect’s name is David Rhine, and what makes his case unique, per Wired and Emptywheel, is his 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 attack.

A previous Wired report last year 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 set 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 initially listed 5,723 devices in response to the warrant, then whittled the tally to exclude likely Capitol staff and police as well as anyone who wasn’t “entirely within the geofence, to about a 70 percent probability.” The final list of identifying details handed over to the FBI had 1,535 names. It included people whose phones had been turned off or put in airplane mode, and “people who attempted to delete their location data following the attacks were singled out by the FBI for greater scrutiny.

In about 50 cases, Wired notes, “geofence data seems to have provided the initial identification of suspected rioters.” Rhine is technically not among them—the FBI got a tip he’d been at the attack—but it was only through the geofencing warrant that agents were able to find surveillance footage showing him inside the building.

And that gets us to what’s troubling here: The Fourth Amendment requires search warrants to specify “probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” A geofencing warrant arguably allows law enforcement to work backward, to say, We think a crime was committed around this place and this time. Let’s sweep up location data for everyone who was there and investigate them all.

Legal experts differ on the constitutionality of this approach, but it sounds remarkably like a general warrant: “one that ‘specifie[s] only an offense,’ leaving ‘to the discretion of executing officials the decision as to which persons should be arrested and which places should be searched.'” General warrants are exactly what the Fourth Amendment is intended to preclude.

It’s easy to conjure scenarios where a geofence warrant would lead police straight to the guilty party with no collateral damage. If you are murdered alone in your house at the center of your 50 undeveloped acres at 2 a.m., and a geofencing warrant turns up one other person on the property at that time, then sure, there’s a solid (albeit not absolute) chance that person is the killer.

Yet as the Capitol cases show, that’s far from the only scenario in which a geofencing warrant might be employed, and 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; 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 police will interpret the map correctly. In 2020, for example, geofence data including a Florida man’s Runkeeper records got him wrongly accused of burglary. He avoided prosecution, but the ordeal cost him thousands of dollars.

Moreover, the innocence of the crime currently under investigation is no guarantee against some part of that movement catching an officer’s eye: Well, he couldn’t have done the murder because he wasn’t close enough, but he did go to this other house for 10 minutes at 1 a.m., and weren’t we thinking the guy who lives there is dealing?

It’s also easy to envision geofencing warrants undergoing the usual surveillance mission creep. Unless a challenge like Rhine’s succeeds, 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,” American University law professor Andrew Ferguson told Wired. Left unchecked, law enforcement could decide geofence data would come in handy while looking for a journalist’s whistleblowing source, or perhaps at political protests.

That happened in summer 2020 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) used at least a dozen geofencing warrants. The stated purpose was identifying people responsible for the estimated $50 million in damage from rioting and looting, but it’s inconceivable that those warrants did not also sweep up the names of peaceful protesters, to say nothing of local residents and business owners uninvolved in the unrest. Maybe demonstrators will leave their phones at home for future protests, or maybe they’ll decide not to go at all.

Law enforcement use of geofence data is relatively novel, but it has skyrocketed in recent years: “Between 2017 and 2018, the number of geofence warrants issued to Google increased by more than 1,500 percent; between 2018 and 2019, over another 500 percent.” By last summer, Google said geofencing warrants comprise a quarter of all legal demands it receives.

That trend won’t stop absent legal constraint, and the January 6 cases—which have had a way of scrambling ordinary political alignments on criminal justice issues—could set a crucial precedent on this question. Whether it’s a good precedent, however, remains to be seen.

The post Geofencing Warrants Are a Threat to Privacy appeared first on Reason.com.

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