Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer | Hacker News Reader

Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer

eff.org

28 pointsdisposition211 comments

At what point are there consequences for bad decisions by judges? At what point are there consequences for bad decisions by prosecutors?

At some point, judges and prosecutors have to be held account for decisions that are clearly unconstitutional or against the law.

Where are the checks for these institutions? Appeals courts and whatever bodies oversee prosecutors is not enough.

"Where are the checks for these institutions?"

The Constitution allows federal judges to be impeached by Congress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_investigations_of_...

That's not working out.

Corruption and incompetence is part of the American judicial tradition.

Scalia took thousands of dollars in free airfare and speaking fees and even was gifted that expensive, exclusive hunting lodge trip where he died.

Clarence Thomas was given a $19,000 bible as a "gift" and $500000 was given to his wife to start a Tea Party group.

This is why I am surprised anyone is phased by what Clinton does in comparison. They'd have to be completely ignorant or very biased.

s/phased/fazed/

From the decision (linked in the EFF article):

For example, hacking is much more prevalent now than it was even nine years ago, and the rise of computer hacking via the Internet has changed the public's reasonable expectations of privacy. ... Now, it seems unreasonable to think that a computer connected to the Web is immune from invasion. Indeed, the opposite holds true: in today's digital world, it appears to be a virtual certainty that computers accessing the Internet can - and eventually will - be hacked.

That's what you get when you combine the doctrine of "expectation of privacy" (which essentially confounds Is and Ought) and the insecurity of today's software.

Yeah, that's crazy. "In Crimes ville, houses are routinely broken into and looted, so the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in Crimesville"

what does that do for the unauthorized access laws?

The question decided here was whether certain government actions violated the Fourth Amendment (which talks about the government needing a warrant to conduct a search). That has nothing to do with a non-government actor gaining unauthorized access to a computer system - that's still illegal.

I would think "no expectation of privacy" implies that a computer is a public space. Wouldn't that make it difficult to say that an access was unauthorized?

The decision talks about the expectations of privacy of criminal defendants, and weighs the interests of privacy against the interests of law enforcement.

The information that that the government malware obtained in this case was metadata, like IP addresses. The decision cites precedents which say that since the user's IP address is already shared with third parties (e.g., ISPs and any web site that the person goes to), it's not private information. Presumably, once the government got the IP addresses, it correlated them with ISPs' records and obtained warrants to physically seize the computers and search them for child porn.

In my opinion this is an overreach on the part of the government, but it doesn't claim that a private computer is a public space, or even that the government can read files on people's computers without a warrant.

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