Big Privacy Ruling Says Feds Can’t Grab Data Abroad With a Warrant:
An appeals court just sent the American Justice Department a clear message about its ability to reach beyond US borders to collect data with a search warrant: Keep your hands to yourself.
Source: Wired
Microsoft just won a huge legal victory on email privacy
U.S. warrants can’t force tech companies to turn over data stored overseas, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
For the first time, federal judge tosses evidence obtained via stingray:
In recent years, stingray use has come under increasing scrutiny. Several states, including California,Washington, Virginia, Minnesota, and Utah, now mandate that a warrant be issued for use of the devices. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice also imposed new policies that require a warrant for stingray use in most cases.
Here, the stingray was used by the Drug Enforcement Agency, which is bound by rules under the DOJ—however, the device was deployed just days before the DOJ announced its new rules.
“Absent a search warrant, the Government may not turn a citizen’s cell phone into a tracking device,” US District Judge William Pauley wrote.
Source: Ars Technica
NYPD Sued After Refusing to Reveal Its Stingray Surveillance Budget:
In February, the NYCLU obtained documents showing that the infamously opaque police department had deployed Stingrays over 1,000 times since 2008 without having any written policy whatsoever governing their use. Like other departments, the NYPD doesn’t get a search warrant to use the devices, relying instead on “pen register” orders that don’t require cops to show probable cause of a crime.
But not included was information on the cost and type of Stingrays, the brand name for a class of device called cell-site simulators, which emulate cellphone towers to track nearby phones but can also be configured to record call logs and intercept text messages en-masse. Earlier this week, another FOIA request from the NYCLU revealed that police in Rochester, New York spent more than $200,000 on a Stingray device that it uses to track suspected gang members.
Now the NYCLU is suing to get that contract information from the NYPD, which has since been revealed by many other police departments.
Source: Vice Magazine
NSA and CIA Double Their Warrantless Searches on Americans in Two Years
Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA collects hundreds of millions of digital communications at rest and in transit from the major internet backbones running in and out of the U.S., as well as from Google, Facebook, YouTube, and other companies, involving “targets” overseas.
Americans’ communications are constitutionally protected from warrantless searches, but when those communications are swept up by the NSA “incidentally” to its main goal, those protections have been essentially ignored.
It May Soon Be a Lot Harder for the Law to Get Into Your Email:
As of today, a warrant is not required to access emails stored online for more than 180 days, which applies to the vast majority of people’s emails—it’s common to keep correspondence stored in webmail for years. (We all do it.) That means law enforcement are required to satisfy a lower standard of legal reasoning to read your webmail than if you printed your email and stored it in a desk drawer.
The law that governs email privacy in the United States hasn’t been updated since 1986, but thanks to the efforts of a coalition of advocates and technology companies, like Google, Microsoft, and Etsy, that have been working together since 2010, the thirty year old email privacy statute may finally get an update.
Court: Cops Need a Warrant to Open Your Phone, Even Just to Look at the Screen
That case, Riley v. California, was a major privacy victory. Now, it’s being interpreted by a federal court in Illinois to mean that even opening a phone to look at the screen qualifies as a “search” and requires a warrant.
The Illinois case involves a sting operation that ensnared Demontae Bell, an alleged drug dealer accused of illegal possession of an AK-47 assault rifle. An officer testified that while interrogating Bell he pulled out a confiscated flip phone and opened it, revealing a picture of the rifle, which Bell had set as his home screen’s wallpaper. That was then used as grounds for a warrant to search Bell’s phone for metadata about when and where the photo was taken. The officer claimed he opened the phone in order to turn it off.
But on Wednesday, the judge ruled police have no right to open a suspect’s phone and look at the screen without first getting a warrant, even if it’s just to turn it off, since the Riley case clearly established doing so is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.
Court: Cops Need a Warrant to Open Your Phone, Even Just to Look at the Screen
That case, Riley v. California, was a major privacy victory. Now, it’s being interpreted by a federal court in Illinois to mean that even opening a phone to look at the screen qualifies as a “search” and requires a warrant.
The Illinois case involves a sting operation that ensnared Demontae Bell, an alleged drug dealer accused of illegal possession of an AK-47 assault rifle. An officer testified that while interrogating Bell he pulled out a confiscated flip phone and opened it, revealing a picture of the rifle, which Bell had set as his home screen’s wallpaper. That was then used as grounds for a warrant to search Bell’s phone for metadata about when and where the photo was taken. The officer claimed he opened the phone in order to turn it off.
But on Wednesday, the judge ruled police have no right to open a suspect’s phone and look at the screen without first getting a warrant, even if it’s just to turn it off, since the Riley case clearly established doing so is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.
No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting to Being Tracked by Police
“Just because it’s easier in 2016 for law enforcement to track our location and learn intimate details about our lives, it doesn’t mean those details are somehow less worthy of Constitutional protection,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. “Get a warrant.”
No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting to Being Tracked by Police
“Just because it’s easier in 2016 for law enforcement to track our location and learn intimate details about our lives, it doesn’t mean those details are somehow less worthy of Constitutional protection,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. “Get a warrant.”