Book Report: Habeas Data

It's a book about recent USA data search-and-seizure law. It describes laws and supreme court cases revolving around convictions based on creepily-acquired data. So you can read about how some bay area police officers spoofed a cell tower so they could find a phony ID forger—using a device that also let them spy on other phone users in the neighborhood, let's hope they didn't peek…

This is a cringe-y book. It's pretty much all about cops getting a lot of information about citizens without getting search warrants first. I think (hope?) police officers normally get warrants before getting creepy-level access to this kind of data… but those cases thus don't tend to percolate up to the supreme court, and thus didn't make it into this book. It makes you wonder about the process for using this equipment at some police departments.