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NJ Supreme Court Rules For Internet Privacy
dprovine writes "The New Jersey Supreme Court
has ruled that ISPs can't release customer information without a warrant. The unanimous decision reads in part 'We now hold that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy protected by Article I ... of the New Jersey Constitution, in the subscriber information they provide to Internet service providers — just as New Jersey citizens have a privacy interest in their bank records stored by banks and telephone billing records kept by phone companies.'"
I'm not a lawyer but I thought precedence was set for this in US Vs Forrester where a $10 million drug operation had their e-mail, phone and IP address records obtained from their ISP without a warrant. They were guilty but not until the court case.
This happened just last year. How are they going to reconcile these two rulings?
My work here is dung.
But those poor folks still have to live in New Jersey.
What EULA? They don't license you anything. This isn't software we are talking about you know. It's a contract you sign with your ISP. Their services in exchange for your money.
On the less pedantic side, do you really think the ISPs want to give your data away? There is no profit in doing so, in fact it might even cause customer loss, which is bad for business. No, the reason they give out your data is because they think they have a legal obligation to do so. Now the court has said it isn't, so they won't.
At least from my perspective. New Jersey courts are particularly active in holding that our State Constitution offers more protection than the federal constitution. (See State v. Nyhammer, 396 NJ Super 72, for a typically bizarre reading of the Fifth Amendment.*)
In this case, an appellate court had previously held that the New Jersey state constitution grants a broad-based right to "informational privacy." Some state constitutions explicitly grant a right to privacy; NJ doesn't, but the Court reads our constitution as having one anyway. And then the appellate court expanded this judicially-granted right to include "informational privacy." The NJ Supreme Court rejected this expansion, although they said that they might change their minds if technology progresses to the point where IP addresses are more freely available.
All in all, I'm happy they ditched the Appellate Division's interpretation. I liked the idea of informational privacy, but I didn't like it coming through the courts.
*In that case, police officers read Nyhammer his Miranda rights. Nyhammer waived his rights, signed the Miranda card, and confessed to molesting an 11-year old girl. The appellate court held that Nyhammer's fifth amendment rights were violated; although he waived his rights, he didn't know at the time that he was a suspect. Therefore, his waiver wasn't really knowing and voluntary, and the court overturned his conviction. Talk about an expansive reading of a right against self-incrimination.
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
As a card carrying member of the ACLU, I regret this sort of case, but it is never the less the proper outcome. For all the people who hate the ACLU because the defend the "guilty" because of a technicality of law, remember this sort of case.
Sometimes the question of an individual's guilt is secondary to the precedent which would be formed. It is absolutely the space between the rock and the hard place. Do you let a criminal go free or do you let an abuse of power go unchecked?
More often than not, it is a "guilty" person who is on the receiving end of injustice such as invasion of privacy or violation of the 4th amendment. It is unfortunate that we don't have more clearly innocent people to protect. Generally speaking, police believe the "criminal" to be guilty. More often than not, they are, but this does not excuse a violation of constitutional rights to get a conviction.
Our rights are in place to prevent the innocent from being falsely convicted by creating a system of checks and balances that is supposed to prevent abuse by police, prosecutors, etc. Inherent in the system is the acknowledgment that people are corrupt and corruptible but the hope that not all people are in the same pockets.
My favorite example is O.J. Simpson. I am as confident that he killed his wife as I am that police planted evidence to get a conviction.
Yeah, they're all in it together for the money.
Or maybe money (or lack thereof) is the reason they can't be bothered investigating every singe one of the 14,000 warrants. Maybe even only about 5 (or 10 or 15) were actually bad warrants, and the rest were perfectly legal and perfectly justifiable.
So, we have two possibilities: a) the government is cohesive, efficient, greedy, corrupt, ruthless, or b) the government is slow, inefficient, under-funded (at least, if you want every warrant triple checked by every layer of authority), and lazy.
I'm betting on b), based on previous encounters with governments and their employees. The separation of powers would also explain the inefficiency, which would in turn explain the low warrant rejection rate. Or I could be wrong, and it could be a) the evil plutocrats wanting quick arrests for some god-knows reason.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
As a historical note, that's the way the Founders meant things to work.
The Federalist Papers tried to reassure people that the proposed new Federal government couldn't succeed as a tyranny because the states would defend the rights of state citizens.
This has been largely forgotten since the national government had to step in and override state-level oppression of African-Americans.