EFF to Court: Electronic Ankle Monitoring Is Bad. Sharing That Data Is Even Worse.
The government violates the privacy rights of individuals on pretrial release when it continuously tracks, retains, and shares their location, EFF explained in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the case, Simon v. San Francisco, individuals on pretrial release are challenging the City and County of San Francisco’s electronic ankle monitoring program. The lower court ruled the program likely violates the California and federal constitutions. We—along with Professor Kate Weisburd and the Cato Institute—urge the Ninth Circuit to do the same.
Under the program, the San Francisco County Sheriff collects and indefinitely retains geolocation data from people on pretrial release and turns it over to other law enforcement entities without suspicion or a warrant. The Sheriff shares both comprehensive geolocation data collected from individuals and the results of invasive reverse location searches of all program participants’ location data to determine whether an individual on pretrial release was near a specified location at a specified time.
Electronic monitoring transforms individuals’ homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods into digital prisons, in which devices physically attached to people follow their every movement. All location data can reveal sensitive, private information about individuals, such as whether they were at an office, union hall, or house of worship. This is especially true for the GPS data at issue in Simon, given its high degree of accuracy and precision. Both federal and state courts recognize that location data is sensitive, revealing information in which one has a reasonable expectation of privacy. And, as EFF’s brief explains, the Simon plaintiffs do not relinquish this reasonable expectation of privacy in their location information merely because they are on pretrial release—to the contrary, their privacy interests remain substantial.
Moreover, as EFF explains in its brief, this electronic monitoring is not only invasive, but ineffective and (contrary to its portrayal as a detention alternative) an expansion of government surveillance. Studies have not found significant relationships between electronic monitoring of individuals on pretrial release and their court appearance rates or likelihood of arrest. Nor do studies show that law enforcement is employing electronic monitoring with individuals they would otherwise put in jail. To the contrary, studies indicate that law enforcement is using electronic monitoring to surveil and constrain the liberty of those who wouldn’t otherwise be detained.
We hope the Ninth Circuit affirms the trial court and recognizes the rights of individuals on pretrial release against invasive electronic monitoring.
[B] WHO(世界保健機構)による人類支配の試み(?) 落合栄一郎
EFF Urges Ninth Circuit to Hold Montana’s TikTok Ban Unconstitutional
Montana’s TikTok ban violates the First Amendment, EFF and others told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a friend-of-the-court brief and urged the court to affirm a trial court’s holding from December 2023 to that effect.
Montana’s ban (which EFF and others opposed) prohibits TikTok from operating anywhere within the state and imposes financial penalties on TikTok or any mobile application store that allows users to access TikTok. The district court recognized that Montana’s law “bans TikTok outright and, in doing so, it limits constitutionally protected First Amendment speech,” and blocked Montana’s ban from going into effect. Last year, EFF—along with the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reason Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology—filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of TikTok and Montana TikTok users’ challenge to this law at the trial court level.
As the brief explains, Montana’s TikTok ban is a prior restraint on speech that prohibits Montana TikTok users—and TikTok itself—from posting on the platform. The law also prohibits TikTok’s ability to make decisions about curating its platform.
Prior restraints such as Montana’s ban are presumptively unconstitutional. For a court to uphold a prior restraint, the First Amendment requires it to satisfy the most exacting scrutiny. The prior restraint must be necessary to further an urgent interest of the highest magnitude, and the narrowest possible way for the government to accomplish its precise interest. Montana’s TikTok ban fails to meet this demanding standard.
Even if the ban is not a prior restraint, the brief illustrates that it would still violate the First Amendment. Montana’s law is a “total ban” on speech: it completely forecloses TikTok users’ speech with respect to the entire medium of expression that is TikTok. As a result, Montana’s ban is subject to an exacting tailoring requirement: it must target and eliminate “no more than the exact source of the ‘evil’ it seeks to remedy.” Montana’s law is undeniably overbroad and fails to satisfy this scrutiny.
This appeal is happening in the immediate aftermath of President Biden signing into law federal legislation that effectively bans TikTok in its current form, by requiring TikTok to divest of any Chinese ownership within 270 days. This federal law raises many of the same First Amendment concerns as Montana’s.
It’s important that the Ninth Circuit take this opportunity to make clear that the First Amendment requires the government to satisfy a very demanding standard before it can impose these types of extreme restrictions on Americans’ speech.