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let's also point out that in this example, the police did exactly their job.

had they seized your car and belongings...

Well, if the bank robbers had left a note with their name and address on it, they would have been justified.

D-bag kid's forged emails were traced back to his IP address, which then led to his SMB name and MAC address. It'll be hard to get out of that.

Plus, unless I'm mixing up the censor squares, it's his roommate that made the accusation in the first place.

So it's not really like they just picked on a random kid with bash skills.

Is sending a forged e-mail accusing your roommate of being gay illegal? It sounds juvenile and malicious. But I don't see how it's a crime.

Anyway, you've misread the warrant application. The forged e-mails were tracked to a dynamic IP address. They searched for anyone else using the same computer name ("bootleg-laptop"), and found that the accused had used the same computer name but NOT the same MAC address six months earlier. They connected the accused to the e-mail by saying that he accessed the same gay social networking site referenced in the forged e-mail before the e-mail was sent, and that the accused and the person who sent the forged e-mails both use Linux.

Anyway, the accused was only targeted because he got into a fight with his roommate, and his overbearing roommate ran off and made crazy accusations about this guy hacking into the grading system. They evidently didn't find anything to support that accusation, so they went after him for this stunt.

Is sending a forged e-mail accusing your roommate of being gay illegal? It sounds juvenile and malicious. But I don't see how it's a crime.

Yes, given that we live in a society where many people think homosexual behavior is grossly immoral, that's prima facie defamation.

No it is not illegal. Defamation, even if it exists, which in this case looks pretty doubtful, is a civil tort.

You're right that defamation is generally a civil tort and not a crime (generally, that is, in the US; I don't know about the jurisdiction in question), and so the police should not have been involved. Thanks!

I couldn't follow that part of the document, but it sounded like he accessed the email account of his roommate (or someone else). That can be held to be illegal. In fact, if they can claim a $5,000 damage amount, it's a federal crime.

As for MAC address, they can be changed. Mine's been DE:AD:BE:EF:CA:FE for years. Not that I think the kid sounds like he'd bother to do that. He could easily swap NICs though.

It seems everyone overlooks the fact that the warrant was also after an undefined number of pirated movies. If found, that alone can cause the suspect serious grief. I wonder if the roommate will regret his testimony later on...

I think you overlooked several discussions before you. I talked specifically about this.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who read the document. I don't see how the police really screwed this one up that much outside of one poorly-worded section of the warrant.

Poorly worded probable cause would be, "I saw him go into a room that was his with a gun and it was hidden," instead of, "I saw him hide a gun in his room."

I think including "Mr. Calixte uses two different operating systems" under the section "Basis of Probable Cause" for search goes beyond poor wording.

My point was more that there was plenty of other valid probable cause claims in the warrant.

If a judge had rejected this warrant on the basis of that paragraph, the police could have just removed it and we and the judge wouldn't have anything to complain about.

The grounds for the seizure were plenty strong - the email traces and network authentication would be enough to get any laptop involved in a crime seized.

And as for people claiming it wasn't a crime - there is no possible way that there was no malicious intent in sending a personal-attack email anonymously to a large group of people. (edit)In this case(/edit), the free-speech argument kind of loses its luster when you send something without your name attached.

The free-speech argument kind of loses its luster when you send something without your name attached.

Maybe you're not from the US, but the US has a legal tradition of strong protections for anonymous and pseudonymous speech. The Federalist Papers, which were a key part of the political discourse leading to the existence of the US, were published anonymously. So maybe what you say is true in Ukraine or China or Myanmar or wherever you're from, but it's certainly not true in the US.

I am from the United States - anonymous and pseudonymous protections wouldn't apply to this case of slander/libel and/or criminal harassment. Anonymously outing someone against their will does not fall under the same protections that critiquing an unfair government does.

I didn't mean to imply that all anonymous talk is without protection, just that in this specific case, the defendant in question would probably have a very difficult time making a successful free speech argument.

Usually, freedom of speech is not a defense against accusations of defamation; the anonymity angle is a red herring.

The issue is not how (or whether) the police "screwed up". The issue is whether a warrant of seizure should be issued on such flimsy grounds. That is quite orthogonal from the guilt or innocence of the suspect.

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