[Welcome to our new contributor, Garret Kirkland of the Defend the Fourth Coalition! - Ed.] What the hell is going on in Massachusetts? Nobody needs to be reminded about the Boston Marathon tragedy, and many of you heard about Cameron D’Ambrosio from Methuen, MA, who was taken into police custody in response to a Facebook [...]
Maryland v. King: Supreme Court Rules That Warrantless DNA Swabs of Arrestees Are A-OK
by Alex Marthews on May 17, 2013
[Originally published before the ruling; text and headline updated to reflect it. - Ed.] The Supreme Court is considering the case Maryland v. King (thanks to Jennifer Wagner at Genomics Law Report for an excellent and detailed analysis), which turns on whether law enforcement needs a warrant to take the DNA of someone arrested and [...]
FBI-Borg Informs US Private Sector of its Impending Assimilation, Generously Limits Fines for Resistance to $25,000 Per Day Per Violation
by Alex Marthews on May 8, 2013
The FBI has a new proposal afoot to require communications companies doing business in the US to make their communications technologies “wiretap-ready”, to avoid the “going-dark problem”. From Charlie Savage at the New York Times, six hours ago: The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of [...]
Drowning in Data, Starved for Wisdom: The surveillance state cannot meaningfully assess terrorism risks
by Alex Marthews on April 26, 2013
The NSA has just vigorously denied that their new Utah Data Center, intended for storing and processing intelligence data, will be used to spy on US citizens. The center will have a capacity of at least one yottabyte, and will provide employment for 100-200 people. With the most generous assumptions [200 employees, all employed only [...]
The Fourth Amendment and the Boston Marathon Attacks: Racialized “Reasonable Suspicion” and the Search of the Saudi Marathoner’s Apartment
by Alex Marthews on April 20, 2013
The Boston Marathon attacks have brought to the surface some of the best and the worst in Massachusetts. On the one side, many news sources reported responsibly and refused to speculate too quickly and without foundation about who the bombers were or why they might have done what they did. There seems at this stage [...]
Stingrays Can Do More Than You Ever Imagined: Law Enforcement, Cellphone Interceptions, and Countermeasures
by Alex Marthews on April 9, 2013
Previously, we reported on the existence of stingrays, also known as `IMSI catchers’, which are used by law enforcement as mobile cellphone towers. Stingrays intercept location and other data from all cellphones in the area, redirecting the traffic from regular cellphone towers. They can be used to get cellphone data without having even to go [...]
Microscope Monday: Analysis of Massachusetts’ proposed Liberty Preservation Act, H. 1428
by Alex Marthews on April 8, 2013
The newly formed Massachusetts chapter of PANDA is bringing forward legislation on Beacon Hill to prevent the indefinite detention of American citizens under the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. The notion that the President should be allowed to detain US citizens without trial and without limit in time of war is a horrifying idea, [...]
Major Crimes Plunge, But AG’s Office Still Pressing To Wiretap All The Things
by Alex Marthews on April 5, 2013
One Catch-22 of criminal justice reform is that law enforcement will always ask for more powers, whether crime is down or crime is up. If crime is up, they need more powers to deal with criminals who have “gotten the upper hand.” If crime is down, they need more powers to keep it from rising [...]
By 2020, Americans May Have Started Talking About The Right To Obscurity
by Alex Marthews on April 4, 2013
Americans are used to thinking of ourselves as “rights pioneers.” But the American constitution is particularly difficult to amend, and is therefore slower than most to respond to a rapidly changing technological and cultural landscape. Justice Brandeis’s 1890 law review article on “The Right to Privacy” conceived of the Constitution as embodying a central, unarticulated [...]
Time to Gut CFAA Like The Rotten Fish It Is: Protests and Reform Proposals for Computer Crime, with Added Matthew Broderick
by Alex Marthews on April 4, 2013
It’s not usually our dealio here at CDFAR to weigh in on federal digital rights, because terrific organizations like EFF, Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and the ACLU generally do that heavy lifting for us. But so much has happened regarding prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that it’s worth focusing on [...]