[ad_1] When police arrested a suspect named Joseph Sam in Washington state last year, an officer hit a button on the man’s phone to bring up its lock screen. Months later, an FBI agent turned the phone on to take a photograph of the lock screen, which contained evidence in the form of a contact, […]
Category: fourth amendment
Court says data swept up by the NSA is protected by the Fourth Amendment
[ad_1] Government attorneys had argued that the Constitution didn’t address the use of private email and phone call data. The US had charged Hasbajrami in 2011 with providing material support to a terrorist group in Pakistan, and the suspect initially pleaded guilty to one of the charges after his counsel told him that there were […]
Federal judge rules suspicionless device searches at the border are illegal
[ad_1] Casper also rejected the government’s claim that suspicionless searches would cause minimal harm, noting that agents could both look at past searches and were more likely to search people if there had already been a search before. The ACLU and EFF filed the lawsuit on behalf of 11 travelers (all but one of which […]
FBI use of NSA’s electronic surveillance data was illegal
[ad_1] The NSA database included both “upstream” and “downstream” (better known as PRISM) surveillance of electronic communications collected without a warrant under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In some cases, the database swept up info about American citizens. The FISA court, under U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, found tens of thousands […]
Police must get warrants to obtain personal data from cars
[ad_1] After a deadly car crash, Georgia police downloaded data from the Event Data Recorder on Mobley’s car to determine his speed before the crash, using that to level more severe accusations against him. Georgia has contended that this was legal under the Fourth Amendment’s “vehicle exception” allowing searches for physical items, but the ACLU […]