Using Fourth-Party Data Brokers To Bypass the Fourth Amendment
Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 01, @11:07PM from the one-party-per-amendment dept.
An anonymous reader writes
"Coming out of Columbia Law School is an article about commercial data brokers and their ability to provide information about individuals to the US government despite Fourth Amendment or statutory protections (abstract, full PDF at Download link). Quoting: 'The Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect information that has been voluntarily disclosed to a third-party or obtained by means of a private search. Congress reacted to these holdings by creating a patchwork of statutes designed to prevent the government's direct and unfettered access to documents stored with third-parties; thus, the government's access is fettered by various statutory requirements, including, in many cases, notice of the disclosure. Despite these protections, however, third-parties are not restricted from passing the same data to other private companies (fourth-parties), and after the events of September 11, 2001, the government, believing that it needed a greater scope of surveillance, turned to the fourth-parties to access the personal information it could not acquire on its own. As a consequence, the fourth-parties, unrestricted by Fourth Amendment or statutory concerns, delivered — and continue to deliver — personal data en masse to the government.'"
eConspiracy! And, it is self-documenting!
http://mashable.com/2009/12/31/drunken-drivers-evade-the-cops-with-twitter/
Drunk Drivers Evade the Cops With Twitter
December 31st, 2009 | by Brenna Ehrlich
Twitter has become the ultimate turncoat lately, functioning as a soldier for the police and drunken drivers alike.
We reported last week that inebriated drivers in Texas are to be outed on Twitter, and now cops report that the culprits themselves are using the microblogging site to inform others of the location of sobriety checkpoints.
(Related) Over-cooperation?
Man Tracked Down and Arrested Via WoW
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 02, @02:09AM from the time-to-bubble-hearth dept.
kabome writes with this excerpt from a story about an alleged drug dealer who was located by law enforcement thanks to World of Warcraft:
"Roberson’s subpoena was nothing more than a politely worded request, considering the limits of his law enforcement jurisdiction and the ambiguity of the online world. 'They don’t have to respond to us, and I was under the assumption that they wouldn’t,' said Roberson. ... Blizzard did more than cooperate. It gave Roberson everything he needed to track down Hightower, including his IP address, his account information and history, his billing address, and even his online screen name and preferred server. From there it was a simple matter to zero in on the suspect's location."
Big Brother by proxy.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=6741
U.S. security rules would break privacy laws, Canadian airlines contend
January 1, 2010 by Dissent Filed under Featured Headlines, Non-U.S., Surveillance
Jim Bronskill of the Canadian Press reports:
Canada’s major airlines say they will be forced either to break privacy laws or to ignore new American air security rules unless the federal government comes up with a response to U.S. demands for passenger information.
The National Airlines Council of Canada, which represents the four largest Canadian carriers, is pleading with the government to find “a permanent solution” to the dilemma posed by the U.S. Secure Flight program.
The program would collect the name, gender and birth date of the approximately five million Canadians who fly through American airspace en route to destinations such as the Caribbean, Mexico and South America, even if their planes don’t touch the ground in the States.
Read more in The Globe and Mail.
“We hate porn so much, we'll pay you to look for it.”
China Arrests Thousands In Internet Porn Crackdown
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 02, @05:14AM from the that-fourth-party-crap-doesn't-sound-so-bad-anymore dept.
Clandestine_Blaze writes
"Chinese police have arrested 5,394 people — with another 4,186 criminal cases in the works — in one of the largest crackdowns on Internet porn in the country. Even more arrests are expected in 2010, according to the Ministry of Public Security's website (In Chinese or Google translated into English). According to the Reuters article on the crackdown, one of the justifications was that the pornography was 'threatening the emotional health of children.' From the English translation of the Ministry of Public Security's website linked above, it appears that certain provinces are also offering 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan rewards, per person, for reporting illegal websites to the government."
Joke-du-jour? This is the wrong kind of law to try enforcing in a country that drinks. Also, a smart lawyer (oxymoron?) would have someone locate an appropriate California cult to take offense an anything. (Attn Gov. Schwarzenegger: Taking these transactions could relieve the budget shortfall!)
Ireland's Blasphemy Law Goes Into Effect
Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 01, @07:13PM from the joe-pesci-is-angry dept.
stereoroid writes
"As of January 1, it is a crime in Ireland to commit Blasphemy. The law was changed in July 2009 to fill a gap in the Irish Constitution, which states that it is a crime but does not define what it is, an omission highlighted in a Supreme Court decision in 1999. To mark the occasion, Atheist Ireland published a list of 25 blasphemous quotations on the blasphemy.ie website, from such controversial figures as Bjork, Frank Zappa, Richard Dawkins, Randy Newman, and Pope Benedict XVI. (The last-mentioned was quoting a 14th Century Byzantine Emperor, but that's no excuse.)"
[From the article:
It defines blasphemy as "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted".
Because I like lists, and don't know everything (yet)
Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
by Erick Schonfeld on January 1, 2010
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