“If at first you kinda suspect
get a warrant, what the heck?”
(Well, it could have been Johnny Cochran)
Nice opinion
in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gerald M. Dunnavant, a
case that involved suppression of evidence obtained from a
confidential informant wearing a silent video device in a suspect’s
home when no warrant has been obtained:
The Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania (“the Commonwealth”) appeals from the order
entered on June 8, 2012 granting the suppression motion filed by
Gerald M. Dunnavant (“the defendant”). On appeal, the
Commonwealth argues that the suppression court erred by prohibiting
for use at trial evidence obtained from a silent video camera worn by
a confidential informant inside the defendant’s residence. After
careful review of this issue of first impression, we affirm.
[...]
The video
recording at issue was government behavior and, through the lens of a
hidden, digital video camera, a warrantless search of the defendant’s
residence. Thus, it is per se unreasonable. Blair, 575 A.2d at
596-597. The Commonwealth does not – and cannot – defend the
video recording at issue with any of the specifically established and
well-delineated exceptions to the warrant requirement. Even
if the Commonwealth’s video recording inside the defendant’s
living room was “inadvertent,” we hold that it was an
unconstitutional invasion of the defendant’s expectation
of privacy in his home. As such, the Commonwealth could not use the
video recording against the defendant.
How did I miss this? I've got to
re-visit my seminar finding tools...
If you missed the conference on
Location
Tracking and Biometrics at Yale yesterday, you missed an
outstanding conference combining informative presentations and lively
discussion and questions from the audience. But not to fear: it’s
available
for viewing (fast forward the first 40 minutes; it seems to start
with Chris Soghoian’s overview of location tracking).
You can find the program here,
with links to articles suggested by panelists. There were four
panels:
Panel 1:
The Fourth Amendment and tracking after U.S. v. Jones
Panel 2: Cellular phones and mobile privacy: Government requests to carriers
Panel 3: Cellular phones and mobile privacy: Direct government surveillance (Stingrays)
Panel 2: Cellular phones and mobile privacy: Government requests to carriers
Panel 3: Cellular phones and mobile privacy: Direct government surveillance (Stingrays)
Panel 4:
Nontrespassory tracking: Biometrics, license plate readers, and
drones
There was just so much packed into the
panel presentations and discussions that I can’t do it justice
here, other than to just tell you: go watch and listen. You’ll
thank me later, although the fourth panel may scare
the bejesus out of you.
@EFFaustin provided yeoman service
throughout the day, tweeting links to additional relevant articles
and resources on the topics. I’ve compiled a list of some of the
many tweets, which includes their suggestions as well as some
resources tweeted by others:
[A number of
interesting links follow... Bob]
Nothing on why the database is valued
(or cost?) $100 million. That seems a bit high for something that so
far has no data...
The road to Hell is paved with good
intention$$?
Stephanie Simon of Reuters reports:
An education
technology conference this week in Austin, Texas, will clang with
bells and whistles as startups eagerly show off their latest wares.
But the most influential new product may be the least flashy: a $100
million database built to chart the academic paths of public school
students from kindergarten through high school.
In operation just three months, the database already holds files on
millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social
security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores
recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks
student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even
homework completion.
Local education officials retain legal control over their students’
information. But federal law allows them to share files in their
portion of the database with private companies selling educational
products and services.
Read more on Yahoo!
Tell me that this isn’t a data
security and privacy disaster waiting to happen. Go on, tell me.
Potentially millions of Social Security numbers and disability
information and the U.S. Education Department thinks this is just
fine? The same federal agency that doesn’t require breaches be
reported to them or to parents? I see….
[From the article:
The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie
Corporation of New York and school officials from several states.
Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built
the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the
Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created
nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
States and school districts can choose whether they want to input
their student records into the system; the service is
free for now, though inBloom officials say they will
likely start to charge fees in 2015. So far, seven states -
Colorado, Delaware, Georgia,
Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Massachusetts - have
committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and
New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide.
This article suggests we may be close
to a “Heisenberg Compensator” – the last component before Star
Trek “Transporters” become possible...
Schrödinger's
Cat could be visible after all
Schrödinger's Cat could be (almost) as
easy to observe as the internet's millions of LOLcats, with
confirmation that there may be a way round Heisenberg's famous
Uncertainty Principle after all.
An interesting application of
Statistics (and a way to highlight new terms for students)
Five
Ways to Create Word Clouds
This morning at the Massachusetts
School Library Association's conference (a fun conference that I
highly recommend) Pam
Berger presented some good ideas for working with primary source
documents and Web 2.0 tools. One of the ideas that she shared and
others elaborated on was the idea of using word clouds to help
students analyze documents. By copying the text of a document into a
word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that
appear most frequently in that document. Here are five tools that
you and your students can use to create word clouds.
Free is Good! Free stuff you actually
want is better!
In case you weren’t aware there are a
lot of eBooks
available on the Internet that cost nothing. If you are willing to
look, they are out there in a big way. However, finding them is not
always as easy as you’d like it to be. They tend to be scattered
around the web in different places. However, Bookresults makes it
easy to find all kinds of free
eBooks on the Internet.
(Related) Because sometimes these are
useful...
The PDF file format has vastly become
the default format for sharing digital documents online. Papers,
eBooks, manuals, and a lot more can be found in the PDF file format
on the Internet. If you need to find a digital document that is in
the PDF file format and has been uploaded publicly, you should check
out a website called Zyndle.
Similar tools: TopHQBooks
and FindPDF.
No comments:
Post a Comment