The simmering surveillance debate just hit a flash point.
On Tuesday morning, Senator Dianne Feinsten, Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the CIA of spying on Senate computers used by committee staff investigating CIA interrogation techniques. The search was supposedly focused on whether the Intelligence Committee had obtained a particular CIA report on interrogation procedures. Senator Feinstein called [...]
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Do you have a telephone? Want to join a class action against the NSA? Rand Paul plans to file a class action lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), and he’s looking for people to join in the suit. He claims that the NSA’s practice of collecting phone records for 100 million people under [...]
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Welcome to another semester at the JETLaw blog! Our patent eligibility symposium is coming up on Jan. 24, and we are soliciting questions for the panel moderators to consider.
The Supreme Court grants cert in the Aereo case, which pits the over-the-air TV streaming upstart against the big broadcasting [...]
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The recent events surrounding Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance program are bringing domestic law enforcement surveillance into the public consciousness. In particular, the implications of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), used by law enforcement agencies all over the country, are being reevaluated.
The recently implemented technology consists of a camera linked to a processing [...]
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Privacy concerns for cloud computing range from hackers obtaining personal information to searches by the government. What is rarely considered are the autoscan searches routinely conducted by some cloud providers. These autoscans usually search material when it is uploaded or downloaded. The cloud providers accomplish this by comparing “ Continue Reading →
A challenge to the Transportation Security Administration’s controversial full-body scans took a crash landing Friday when a federal court of appeals upheld the screenings against a slew of constitutional and statutory challenges.
Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scans use low-intensity X-rays or radio frequencies to map an undressed image of air travelers as they [...]
Continue Reading →Here’s a travel warning you won’t get from the State Department: The Ninth Circuit last week held that police may seize digital devices at the border, transport them 170 miles to a forensics lab and search them during a two-day period, all without reasonable suspicion.
The decision marks the latest piecemeal expansion to the so-called [...]
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In the United States, citizens are guaranteed protection from unreasonable search and seizure by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. But as anyone who’s looked into Fourth Amendment jurisprudence will tell you, the most important word in that analysis is unreasonable. Courts around the country have developed a wide range of categories that [...]
Continue Reading →Now that Thanksgiving has passed and with it (to some extent) the controversy over the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) full-body scan/pat-down security procedures at airports, a similar controversy looks to be heating up in a different venue. Two courthouses in Colorado–the Douglas County Courthouse in Castle Rock, CO and the El Paso County Judicial Center [...]
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Although J. Edgar Hoover may be dead, his spirit remains alive and well.
This past Monday, the New York Times broke a story about proposed legislation that would make it easier for law enforcement to conduct wiretaps on the Internet. In essence, the legislation and accompanying regulations would mandate that all communication services, [...]
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