Major ruling updates privacy laws for 21st century
WEB STOCK Police Officer inspects a cell phone. (AP Photo>The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police cannot go snooping through people’s cell phones without a warrant, in a unanimous decision that amounts to a major statement in favor of privacy rights.Police agencies had argued that searching through the data on cell phones was no different than asking someone to turn out his pockets, but the justices rejected that, saying a cell phone is more fundamental.
The ruling amounts to a 21st century update to legal understanding of privacy rights.
“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the unanimous court.
“Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple— get a warrant.”
Justices even said police cannot check a cellphone’s call log, saying even those contain more information that just phone numbers, and so perusing them is a violation of privacy that can only be justified with a warrant.
The chief justice said cellphones are different not only because people can carry around so much more data — the equivalent of millions of pages of documents — that police would have access to, but that the data itself is qualitatively different than what someone might otherwise carry.
He said it could lay bare someone’s entire personal history, from their medical records to their “specific movements down to the minute.”
The chief justice cited court precedent that found a difference between asking someone to turn out his pockets versus “ransacking his house for everything which may incriminate him” — and the court found that a cellphone falls into that second category.
Complicating matters further is the question of where the data is actually stored. The Obama administration and the state of California, both of which sought to justify cell phone searches, acknowledged that remotely stored data couldn’t be searched — but Chief Justice Roberts said with cloud computing, it’s now sometimes impossible to know the difference.
The court did carve out exceptions for “exigencies” that arise, such as major security threats.
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U.S. Supreme Court Pulls the Plug on Aereo's Streaming TV Service
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt a potentially fatal blow to Aereo, an Internet service that allows customers to watch broadcast TV programs on mobile devices.
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Launched a year ago in New York and then extended to 10 other U.S. cities, it allows customers to watch over-the-air TV programs on a smartphone, tablet, or computer for as little as $8 a month. Selections can be viewed live or recorded for later viewing.
The court found that Aereo violates federal copyright law by retransmitting copyrighted programs without paying a copyright fee.
Chet Kanojia, Aereo founder and CEO, said in a statement the ruling is "a massive setback for the American consumer."
"This sends a chilling message to the technology industry," he said.
Media mogul Barry Diller, a major backer of the service, told CNBC, "We did try, but it's over now,”
Woman Says DHS Forced Her to Strip Naked at Gunpoint During Terrifying Dawn Raid
"Two hours of pure hell" as SWAT team trashes home
by Paul Joseph Watson | June 24, 2014
Kari Edwards said she and her boyfriend were forced to strip naked at gunpoint during a terrifying Department of Homeland Security dawn raid on their Florida home which lasted for two hours.
The incident began on June 10 at 6:16am when numerous armed SWAT team members, accompanied by a helicopter overhead, arrived in an armored vehicle at the couple’s address before smashing in the door and deafening their pet cat with flash bang smoke grenades.
“They busted in like I was a terrorist or something,” Edwards told the Tea Party News Network, adding, “[An officer] demanded that I drop the towel I was covering my naked body with before snatching it off me physically and throwing me to the ground.”
Having been previously employed by the federal agency herself, Edwards noted that some of the men were DHS agents, although when quizzed as to who they were and why they were conducting the raid, the men only responded by saying that they were “police,” while calling Edwards “stupid” and “retarded” for asking the question.
“While I lay naked, I was cuffed so tightly I could not feel my hands. For no reason, at gunpoint,” Edwards said. “[Agents] refused to cover me, no matter how many times I asked.”
According to Edwards’ boyfriend, one of the agents then proceeded to ogle his naked girlfriend up and down like a piece of candy.
“They spent about 2 hours trashing my house, even smashing clear glass shower doors and a vintage statue,” writes Edwards on her YouTube channel. “My boyfriend, who is asthmatic, started having trouble breathing due to the lingering smoke created by the flash bang grenade.”
After trashing her home for two hours, Edwards said the SWAT team eventually handed her a warrant signed by Jonathan Goodman, a federal magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, which authorized the agents to search for computers and electronics, although Edwards claims police seemed uninterested in the couple’s electronics and did not seize any items despite raising the suspicion of child pornography.
Surveillance camera footage of the incident shows armed agents surrounding the property. Edwards says the clip is brief because the agents ripped out her surveillance DVR while claiming that they couldn’t be recorded.
Edwards summed up her experience by describing the incident as “two hours of pure hell.” The couple have filed a complaint with the ACLU.
While the details of the incident remain unconfirmed, the story will heighten concerns that the DHS is turning into a “standing army” emblematic of a militarized police state.
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute recently cited numerous examples of out of control DHS activity to make the point that the federal agency is a “beast that is accelerating our nation’s transformation into a police state through its establishment of a standing army, aka national police force.”
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
Federal judge rules U.S. no-fly list violates Constitution
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By Dan Whitcomb
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(Reuters) - The U.S. government's no-fly list banning people accused of links to terrorism from commercial flights violates their constitutional rights because it gives them no meaningful way to contest that decision, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Anna Brown, ruling on a lawsuit filed in federal court in Oregon by 13 Muslim Americans who were branded with the no-fly status, ordered the government to come up with new procedures that allow people on the no-fly list to challenge that designation.
"The court concludes international travel is not a mere convenience or luxury in this modern world. Indeed, for many international travel is a necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society," Brown wrote in her 65-page ruling.
"Accordingly, on this record the court concludes plaintiffs inclusion on the no-fly list constitutes a significant deprivation of their liberty interests in international travel," Brown said.
The decision hands a major victory to the 13 plaintiffs - four of them veterans of the U.S. military - who deny they have links to terrorism and say they only learned of their no-fly status when they arrived at an airport and were blocked from boarding a flight.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought suit against the policy in 2010, argues that secrecy surrounding the list and lack of any reasonable opportunity for plaintiffs to fight their placement on it violates their clients' constitutional rights to due process.
“For years, in the name of national security the government has argued for blanket secrecy and judicial deference to its profoundly unfair no-fly list procedures and those arguments have now been resoundingly rejected by the court," Hina Shamsi, the ACLU's national security project director, said in a written statement.
"This excellent decision also benefits other people wrongly stuck on the no-fly list with the promise of a way out from a Kafkaesque bureaucracy causing them no end of grief and hardships," Shamsi said.
The government contends there is an adequate means of contesting the flight ban and that individuals listed under the policy may ultimately petition a U.S. appeals court directly for relief.
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice, which defended the lawsuit, declined to comment, other than to say they needed more time to read the ruling.
The no-fly list, established in 2003 in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, bars those on it from flying within the United States or to and from the country. As of last year, it included some 20,000 people deemed by the FBI as having, or reasonably suspected of having, ties to terrorism, an agency spokesman said at the time. About 500 of them were U.S. citizens.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bill Trott)
NSA snooping is terrible for the tech industry, awful. By extension the snooping is bad for the economy generally. Cisco has already said that its overseas orders are down in a big way because customers are afraid that Cisco products are full of back doors for the US government.
This trend will only continue. Torpedoing the most important part of the US economy for an all pervasive surveillance state just isn’t very smart.
The NSA is supposedly trying to “protect” us from terrorism and most importantly the economic impact of terrorism. That is what we are told anyway. The NSA in its efforts however is now creating it’s own brand of economic chaos.
Click here for the article.
Source: http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2014/06/microsoft-future-blea...