You Can't Defend Your Rights One at a Time

One afternoon, in one American city, the police asked a single question: who was here?

Not "who committed this crime." Not "where is our suspect." Just who was standing in this particular square of the map, during this particular window of time. And then they asked a technology company to hand over everyone who fit.

Picture the four people that question might catch. A woman leaving a clinic. A man at Friday prayer. A teenager at a protest. A retiree walking the floor of a gun show. Four people who would not agree on a single thing at a dinner table, none of them suspected of anything, and all four pulled out of the crowd by the same request, because they happened to be standing inside the same box.

That request is real, it is legal in much of this country, and it has a name. Before we get to it, I want to tell you where I'm standing, because it changes how you should read everything after this.

Why a leftist wrote this

I'm on the left, an unabashed democratic socialist if you want the label, and I'm telling you that for a reason, not as a confession. Being on the left is precisely why I refuse to treat the Bill of Rights like a menu. I'm also a gun owner, and I have a permit to carry. That's the last time I'll mention it, because this is not about guns and the Second Amendment alone was never the point. The point is that it's part of an interlocking system of rights, the same as the First Amendment and the Fourth. Pull it out, and the wall gets weaker for everyone, including people who will never touch a firearm.

Here's what the right got wrong: it spent decades claiming to love freedom while building the surveillance state brick by brick. And here's what too much of my own side got wrong: we handed back the Bill of Rights one amendment at a time, because the wrong people were holding it. Both made the same mistake, treating rights as separate things you can trade away individually. You can't. They work in unison, or they fall in sequence.

So the principle here is one standard, applied to every right, even when it's inconvenient. Especially then.

The bike ride that became a burglary investigation

In 2019, a man named Zachary McCoy went for a bike ride in Gainesville, Florida. He had a fitness app running, tracking his mileage, with his phone's location services on, the same setup tens of millions of people use without a second thought. His usual loop happened to pass an elderly woman's house, and he rode past it three times in an hour, because that's what a loop is. That day, that house was burglarized. [1]

Months later, Google emailed him: law enforcement had requested his account data, and he had a narrow window to try to stop it. No detective had ever knocked on his door. He learned he was a suspect in a crime he'd never heard of, because his phone had been near the scene and an automated system flagged him. His parents dipped into their savings to hire a lawyer, whose job was to prove a negative: that riding a bike past a house is not the same as robbing it. His attorney described the underlying warrant as one that casts "a net backwards in time." Eventually the state withdrew it and McCoy was cleared. [1]

The tool is called a geofence warrant, or reverse-location warrant. A conventional warrant starts with a suspect and seeks evidence. This one runs backwards. It starts with a location and demands everyone who was inside it, everybody first and suspects later. These are not rare or hypothetical. Google has reported that requests like these surged by more than a thousand percent in a single year. [1]

The courts are not entirely blind to where this leads. In 2018, the Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that police generally need a warrant to obtain your phone's historical location records, a genuine line in the sand. [2] But hold onto that ruling, because there's a loophole that hollows it out, and it deserves its own discussion. When the government can't easily get a warrant, it can often simply buy the same location data on the open market from private brokers, the so-called third-party loophole. [3] A right you can purchase your way around is not a right. We'll come back to that.

Walk the wall

Here is the part I most need you to see, because it's the thread through everything this publication will ever cover.

That single tool, one box on one map, does not break one right. Watch it move.

It's a privacy violation on its face: your location, taken while you were no one's suspect. But point the same box at a protest, and it becomes a list of everyone who showed up to exercise the right to assemble. Point it at a house of worship, and it's a roster of a congregation, the free exercise of religion, logged. Point it at a gun show, and it's a de facto registry of people exercising the Second Amendment.

Same tool. Same afternoon. Four rights, breached together, not one at a time but at once, because that's how the people were standing. This is what it means to say your rights work in unison. The system already understands this.

The test you'll want to flinch at

If the geofence warrant bothered you, good. Now here's the test of whether you meant it, or whether you just dislike it when it's your side in the box, because I'm about to defend a right much of my own audience has decided not to care about.

In 1967, a group of Black men and women walked into the California statehouse openly carrying rifles, legally, to protest police violence. They were the Black Panthers. The response was swift and bipartisan: California passed the Mulford Act, banning open carry, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan with the support of the NRA. [4] In that moment, gun control was a tool to disarm Black radicals the state feared. And it wasn't new. After the Civil War, disarming free Black Americans was written directly into the Black Codes. [5] The pattern is old and ugly: "reasonable" gun restrictions, again and again, aimed at the people those in power feared most. If you want this argument made in full, from the left, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded is the place to start. [6] This isn't a contrarian pose. It's a position the left used to hold.

Now the hard part, held honestly instead of skipped. Take red flag laws, or extreme risk protection orders, which let a court temporarily remove someone's firearms during a crisis. [7] I want fewer people dying, and I won't pretend that instinct is wrong. But run it through the standard we just built. Who flags the person? On what evidence? Is there a real, adversarial hearing, or a secret tip and an algorithmic risk score? "We'll remove your rights first and let you argue later" is a sentence that should alarm you regardless of which right is on the table. You can want fewer gun deaths and still insist that due process survives contact with a crisis. Holding both at once isn't a contradiction. It's the entire job. That tension gets its own dispatch, and it's the one I'm most nervous to write.

The point isn't that you should love guns. It's this: the database you'd be horrified to see built around mosque attendance is the same database some of you would cheer when it's built around gun owners. Same database. Same machine. And once it's built for one right, it is already built for the next.

The whole wall, or none of it

So here is the scope, so no one mistakes the example for the subject. This is about what AI and surveillance are doing to your civil liberties, all of them. Free speech and encryption. Privacy and unreasonable search. Due process when the accuser is an algorithm. Assembly and association. And the right to keep and bear arms, one beam in the structure, not the building. One question asked of each: what does the technology do to this right, who gains power over it, and which other rights fall when it does.

The thread is not "guns good" or "tech bad." It's that your rights are an interlocking structure, and a structure has no unimportant beam. A socialist defends an armed citizenry's rights for the same reason they defend encrypted messaging and the right to march: you do not hand any institution a monopoly. Not a police department, not a data broker, not a tech platform, not a federal agency. Not a monopoly on force, not on information, not on the power to decide who counts as a suspect before anyone has done anything.

These were never separate fights. They are one wall. And you do not defend a wall one brick at a time while someone quietly pulls the others out behind you.

Your rights don't work alone. They cover each other's flank. That's why they come for them one at a time, and it's why you can't defend them one at a time.

The platforms that carry this work can throttle it whenever they like. The newsletter can't be throttled by anyone. It's the one channel they can't put a wall between us. If the courts are going to keep ruling that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy, the least we can do is refuse the premise together. Subscribe at noreasonable.com.

Every right. No exceptions.

Sources

Every claim above is checkable. Links verified; a skeptical reader can confirm each independently.

Zachary McCoy and the geofence warrant, Gainesville, FL (2019–2020). Jon Schuppe, "Google tracked his bike ride past a burglarized home. That made him a suspect," NBC News, March 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761 (the bike route past the house, the Google notice, attorney Caleb Kenyon's "net backwards in time" description, and Google's reported surge in geofence requests of more than 1,500% from 2017 to 2018).
Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). Official Supreme Court opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf · Case summary and oral argument: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402 (5–4; police generally need a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location information).
The third-party and data-broker loophole. Brennan Center for Justice, "Closing the Data Broker Loophole": https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/closing-data-broker-loophole · ACLU on DHS/CBP/ICE location-data purchases: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/new-records-detail-dhs-purchase-and-use-of-vast-quantities-of-cell-phone-location-data · Sen. Wyden, Government Surveillance Reform Act: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-lee-davidson-and-lofgren-introduce-bill-to-reform-fisa-section-702-protect-americans-constitutional-rights-and-plug-data-broker-surveillance-loophole · Foundational doctrine: Smith v. Maryland (1979) and United States v. Miller (1976). Flagged for its own future dispatch.
The Mulford Act (1967), the Black Panthers, and Reagan. History.com, "The NRA Supported Gun Control When the Black Panthers Had the Weapons": https://www.history.com/articles/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act · Snopes fact-check confirming NRA support: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nra-california-open-carry-ban/ · Duke Center for Firearms Law (scholarly, adds nuance): https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2020/04/the-black-panthers-nra-ronald-reagan-armed-extremists-and-the-second-amendment (Note for your framing: the NRA's support and Reagan's signing are solid. The "aimed at disarming Black radicals" reading is widely held, but the Duke piece notes the bill was also pitched as targeting armed white groups like the Minutemen, and Mulford publicly denied racial motive. Acknowledging that nuance will make the segment harder to attack.)
Black Codes and post–Civil War disarmament. Cardozo Law Review, "Racist History and the Second Amendment: A Critical Commentary": https://www.cardozolawreview.com/racist-history-and-the-second-amendment-a-critical-commentary/ · Jeff Jacoby, "The very racist history of gun control," Boston Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/31/opinion/very-racist-history-gun-control/ (Mississippi's 1865 Black Code barred any "freedman, free Negro, or mulatto" from keeping firearms or ammunition; Florida's did likewise.)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights Books, 2018). Publisher page: https://citylights.com/open-media-series/loaded-a-disarming-hist-of-the-2nd/
Red flag laws and Extreme Risk Protection Orders. Neutral/legal: Cornell Legal Information Institute (Wex): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Extreme_Risk_Protection_Order_ERPO · Scholarly due-process analysis, Blocher & Charles, Virginia Law Review: https://virginialawreview.org/articles/firearms-extreme-risk-and-legal-design-red-flag-laws-and-due-process/ · For the safety rationale (advocacy sources, label as such): Everytown https://www.everytown.org/solutions/extreme-risk-laws/ and Giffords https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/who-can-have-a-gun/extreme-risk-protection-orders/ (The Cornell and Virginia Law Review links carry both the public-safety case and the ex parte/due-process critique, which is the balance the text strikes.)