It’s always good to remember that storing your email on someone else’s server is a potential problem.
Apr 232010
There are currently no firm standards on the kinds of Fourth Amendment protections that should apply to cell phone tracking data. This is becoming an issue as GPS and other tracking technologies have been added to cell phone to satisfy E911 requirements, and as police agencies have discovered the potential benefits of mobile-phone location data.
Feb 062010
The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years.
A federal trial court in Oregon ruled that a suspect’s rights were not violated when police — tipped by a neighbor — accessed his unprotected WiFi network and saw child pornography shared via his iTunes library.
Jan 222010
A federal judge has dismissed Jewel v. NSA, a case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on behalf of AT&T customers challenging the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls and emails.
In a Note called Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing, David A. Couillard explores the potential applicability of the Fourth Amendment to data stored in offsite servers: spreadsheets in Google Docs, accounting data hosted on FreshBooks, and pretty much everything synced through DropBox, just to name three example services.
FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in an interview Monday that the FBI technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records.
The TSA issued a directive aimed at instituting new security measures. After two bloggers published it, the TSA issued subpoenas that sought to compel them to reveal their sources. Why did the TSA think they could do this, and did they have the power to enforce their request?
There has always been an exception to search and seizure law at border crossings. In theory, this is nothing new — attorneys traveling with confidential paper files could also have them searched. But the ease of carrying vast numbers of confidential documents in electronic form raises the bar on this.
Should accessing content via the Google Books service provide the same protections as one would receive when relying on a bookstore? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU say, “Yes.”
While the use of secret evidence may be acceptable initially (as part of an investigation or short-term detention while more evidence is gathered), the defense needs access to this evidence. Without it, any trial or legal process is simply unfair.
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