Entries Tagged "courts"

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Stupidest Terrorist Overreaction Yet?

What? Are the police taking stupid pills?

Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.

The competition is fierce, but I think this is a winner.

What bothers me most about the news coverage is that there isn’t even a suggestion that the authorities’ response might have been out of line.

Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Translation: We screwed up, and we want someone to pay for our mistake.

Posted on August 27, 2007 at 2:34 PM • View Comments

Interview with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell

Mike McConnell, U.S. National Intelligence Director, gave an interesting interview to the El Paso Times.

I don’t think he’s ever been so candid before. For example, he admitted that the nation’s telcos assisted the NSA in their massive eavesdropping efforts. We already knew this, of course, but the government has steadfastly maintained that either confirming or denying this would compromise national security.

There are, of course, moments of surreality. He said that it takes 200 hours to prepare a FISA warrant. Ryan Single calculated that since there were 2,167 such warrants in 2006, there must be “218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants.” Seems unlikely.

But most notable is this bit:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate.

Ah, the politics of fear. I don’t care if it’s the terrorists or the politicians, refuse to be terrorized. (More interesting discussions on the interview here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Posted on August 24, 2007 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Wholesale Automobile Surveillance Comes to New York City

New York is installing an automatic toll-collection system for cars in the busiest parts of the city. It’s called congestion pricing, and it promises to reduce both traffic and pollution.

The problem is that it keeps an audit log of which cars are driving where. London’s congestion pricing system is already being used for counterterrorism purposes—and now for regular crime as well. The EZPass automatic toll collection system, used in New York and other places, has been used to prove infidelity in divorce court.

There are good reasons for having this system, but I am worried about another wholesale surveillance tool.

EDITED TO ADD (9/4): EZPass records have been used in criminal court as well.

Posted on August 17, 2007 at 6:48 AM • View Comments

Surveillance Cameras that Obscure Faces

From Technology Review:

A camera developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, would obscure, with an oval, the faces of people who appear on surveillance videos. These so-called respectful cameras, which are still in the research phase, could be used for day-to-day surveillance applications and would allow for the privacy oval to be removed from a given set of footage in the event of an investigation.

An interesting privacy-enhancing technology.

Posted on June 26, 2007 at 7:41 AM • View Comments

4th Amendment Rights Extended to E-Mail

This is a great piece of news in the U.S. For the first time, e-mail has been granted the same constitutional protections as telephone calls and personal papers: the police need a warrant to get at it. Now it’s only a circuit court decision—the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio—it’s pretty narrowly defined based on the attributes of the e-mail system, and it has a good chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court…but it’s still great news.

The way to think of the warrant system is as a security device. The police still have the ability to get access to e-mail in order to investigate a crime. But in order to prevent abuse, they have to convince a neutral third party—a judge—that accessing someone’s e-mail is necessary to investigate that crime. That judge, at least in theory, protects our interests.

Clearly e-mail deserves the same protection as our other personal papers, but—like phone calls—it might take the courts decades to figure that out. But we’ll get there eventually.

Posted on June 25, 2007 at 4:13 PM • View Comments

Third Party Consent and Computer Searches

U.S. courts are weighing in with opinions:

When Ray Andrus’ 91-year-old father gave federal agents permission to search his son’s password-protected computer files and they found child pornography, the case turned a spotlight on how appellate courts grapple with third-party consents to search computers.

[…]

The case was a first for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and only two other circuits have touched on the issue, the 4th and 6th circuits. The 10th Circuit held that although password-protected computers command a high level of privacy, the legitimacy of a search turns on an officer’s belief that the third party had authority to consent.

The 10th Circuit’s recent 2-1 decision in U.S. v. Andrus, No. 06-3094 (April 25, 2007), recognized for the first time that a password-protected computer is like a locked suitcase or a padlocked footlocker in a bedroom. The digital locks raise the expectation of privacy by the owner. The majority nonetheless refused to suppress the evidence.

Excellent commentary from Jennifer Granick:

The Fourth Amendment generally prohibits warrantless searches of an individual’s home or possessions. There is an exception to the warrant requirement when someone consents to the search. Consent can be given by the person under investigation, or by a third party with control over or mutual access to the property being searched. Because the Fourth Amendment only prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures,” permission given by a third party who lacks the authority to consent will nevertheless legitimize a warrantless search if the consenter has “apparent authority,” meaning that the police reasonably believed that the person had actual authority to control or use the property.

Under existing case law, only people with a key to a locked closet have apparent authority to consent to a search of that closet. Similarly, only people with the password to a locked computer have apparent authority to consent to a search of that device. In Andrus, the father did not have the password (or know how to use the computer) but the police say they did not have any reason to suspect this because they did not ask and did not turn the computer on. Then, they used forensic software that automatically bypassed any installed password.

The majority held that the police officers not only weren’t obliged to ask whether the father used the computer, they had no obligation to check for a password before performing their forensic search. In dissent, Judge Monroe G. McKay criticized the agents’ intentional blindness to the existence of password protection, when physical or digital locks are such a fundamental part of ascertaining whether a consenting person has actual or apparent authority to permit a police search. “(T)he unconstrained ability of law enforcement to use forensic software such at the EnCase program to bypass password protection without first determining whether such passwords have been enabled … dangerously sidestep(s) the Fourth Amendment.”

[…]

If courts are going to treat computers as containers, and if owners must lock containers in order to keep them private from warrantless searches, then police should be required to look for those locks. Password protected computers and locked containers are an inexact analogy, but if that is how courts are going to do it, then its inappropriate to diminish protections for computers simply because law enforcement chooses to use software that turns a blind eye to owners’ passwords.

Posted on June 5, 2007 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.