Unpacking the FISA Section 702 Reauthorization Bill | There’s No Easy Answer to Chinese EVs | Google’s Location History Program & Digital Surveillance Law, and more

How Google’s Location History Program Could Upend Digital Surveillance Law (Matthew Tokson, Lawfare)
On May 20, 2019, Okello Chatrie robbed a bank in Midlothian, Virginia. Wearing a fisherman’s hat and a traffic vest, he handed the bank teller a threatening note and pulled a gun on her. He then forced the bank manager at gunpoint to open the vault and made off with $195,000. Unable to identify the robber, Chesterfield police Detective Joshua Hylton served Google with a geofence warrant—a warrant targeting all cell phone users in a certain area at a certain time. He obtained data on cell phones located within a circular area 300 meters in diameter around the bank within an hour of the bank robbery. Hylton received data on 19 cell phones, one of which turned out to be Chatrie’s.
A federal district court found that the geofence warrant used in the Chatrie investigation violated the Constitution because it lacked the particularity required by the Fourth Amendment. But it also held that the geofence evidence would not be suppressed under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, since Detective Hylton had relied on the warrant in good faith. Google filed a brief and several declarations in the case, describing its Location History program. The district court eventually adopted several of these descriptions in its lengthy opinion. Google’s statements indicated that millions of Google users, including Chatrie, affirmatively opted in to using Location History by checking a box they accessed via Google settings. But a close examination of the trial records and Google’s later testimony regarding its Location History program reveals that this is not what happened to Chatrie, or to millions of other users like him.
Chatrie eventually appealed the district court’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which heard arguments on it in December 2023. At oral argument, the judges repeated several of Google’s points, accepting them as central to resolving a crucial Fourth Amendment question at issue: whether cell phone users have any Fourth Amendment rights in the location data they share with cell phone apps. The Supreme Court’s last major Fourth Amendment decision, Carpenter v. United States, held that users had a Fourth Amendment right in the location data collected by their cell service provider. 
But the Fourth Circuit appears to have found a way around this decision. If users opt in to Location History and similar app services, they may be affirmatively, voluntarily disclosing their data—which may place it outside of the Fourth Amendment’s protection. Indeed, the Chatrie case threatens to undermine existing constitutional protections for location data—and future protections for virtually every other type of cell phone data as well. 

Unpacking the FISA Section 702 Reauthorization Bill  (David Aaron, Just Security)
As another sunset of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 authorities looms, the House of Representatives has passed a compromise bill, the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act,” H.R. 7888 (RISAA), which the Senate is now considering. 
The bill would reauthorize Section 702 – the controversial law that allows the U.S. government to acquire communications of non-Americans outside the United States without a warrant – and make a range of changes to FISA overall. It has something to interest everyone, from addressing the use of U.S. person query terms to formalizing oversight measures to a technical expansion of the type of service provider that can be compelled to help the U.S. government acquire communications. The changes are a combination of direct responses to legislative gaps and real or perceived Executive Branch transgressions, codifying existing practices, and updating FISA in ways that are evolutionary, but not radical. Taken together, they appear to reflect deep dissatisfaction with how the Executive Branch has implemented aspects of FISA, paired with a recognition of the need to permit essential national security operations to continue under the supervision of all three branches of government. 

Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters  (David Gilbert, Wired)
As the presidential election approaches, and conspiracies about the integrity of the electoral system ramp up, election deniers and conspiracists have coalesced around a narrative they plan to push ahead of November: Blame the immigrants.
And not only that, election deniers are now advocating for a far-right sheriff’s group called the Constitutional Sheriffs to recruit an army of like-minded citizens to patrol polling stations and stop the “expected flood” of “illegal” immigrant voters.
Constitutional Sheriffs are a group of elected sheriffs around the country who believe that they hold the ultimate power in their county, and are not answerable to any federal or state authority. They also believe that all of their power stems directly from the constitution.

There’s No Easy Answer to Chinese EVs  (Rogé Karma, The Atlantic)
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?
The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Later research found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.
Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.
This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”