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Judge Says Boston Student's Laptop Was Seized Illegally
You may remember a case we discussed this April in which a Boston College student's computers and other electronics were seized after he allegedly sent an email outing another student as gay. The search warrant made sure to note the student's ever-so-suspicious use of "two different operating systems," one of which was "a black screen with a white font which he uses prompt commands on." Now, the EFF reports that a Massachusetts judge has thrown out the search warrant and declared the search and seizure illegal. Quoting: "In her order Thursday, Justice Margot Botsford rejected the Commonwealth's theory that sending a hoax email might be unlawful under a Massachusetts computer crime statute barring the 'unauthorized access' to a computer, concluding that there could be no violation of what was only a 'hypothetical internet use policy.' Thursday's decision now stands as the highest state court opinion to reject the dangerous theory that terms of service violations constitute computer 'hacking' crimes. Justice Botsford further found that details offered by police as corroboration of other alleged offenses were insufficient and did not establish probable cause for the search." The court order (PDF) is available for viewing, and the EFF has broken down the significant arguments against the Commonwealth's claims.
And it's not only used by rebels wanting to dodge the law? Bah, I'm going back to Windows.
Now when does he get his equipment back? What happens when they hand him a box of busted parts and walk away? (Like Steve Jackson Games)
It is great that we have this victory for our rights. But how do we keep the police from doing it over and over again? The out of control police need oversight to make sure they don't do this again!
Slashdot is gay.
Or can the police kick down your door, seize whatever they want and when the court deems their actions as illegal they just say "Oops, our bad."?
the what would happen to this person(http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147959) who installed 145??
I hope the judge that issued the search warrant AND the police that executed it are severely punished... Oh what AM I saying..This is now the USSA and law enforcement does whatever it wants.. This judge with a "Constitutional" brain on her shoulders will be taken out for "re-education..."
What WAS I thinking.....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
IANAL.
The first think I would do in this guy's situation is to sue the city under the premise that since the search warrant was illegal, all activities flowing from the warrant were performed outside of the city's normal police powers. Since the activities were carried out without any authorized police powers, they were also carried out without the normal protections granted police during the lawful execution of their duties.
Potential charges would be:
1) Breaking and entering.
2) Trespassing.
3) Illegal search and seizure.
4) Theft of personal property.
5) Possession of stolen property.
6) Vandalism.
7) Unlawful entry.
8) False arrest.
9) False imprisonment (note that this doesn't require actually being jailed).
10) Dereliction of duty.
The next two would also be levied against whatever organization the city hired to peruse through my files:
11) Unauthorized access to a computing device.
12) Circumvention of a copy-protection mechanism (my user and root passwords).
I'm sure I could come up with more if I did some research.
Right. You expect the prosecutor to smite itself and its minions? Dream on.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
There is so much stupidity going on in our state, including spending and tax increases in the midst of the worst recession since the great depression, knee-jerk reactions to viral advertising campaigns using lite-brites (which did NOT cause an overreaction in much larger, more vulnerable cities), and so forth. Therefore, I propose the following tags for stories involving stupidity here in Massachusetts (even in the event where a sudden outbreak of common sense occurs, because it was masshattery which got us there in the first place):
taxachusetts
massholes
masshattery
I hope you welcome and endorse this proposal. I, for one, am ashamed of what is going on here in my state and even as a business owner I am hoping that the sales tax and income tax and fuel tax increases in the midst of this recession break this state financially just to prove to the lawmakers that one cannot tax one's way back to prosperity.
What we need right now is deep spending and tax cuts, and that INCLUDES firing the moron police officers who resulted in this moronic case.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Command: "give my laptop back, you fascist fucks."
Prompt Command: "give my laptop back RIGHT FUCKING NOW you fascist fucks!"
Credited
It would be so nice if your statements had no issue... but this kid bought the laptop which was taken from him. A laptop is a machine, much the same as a car or telephone, and could even be compared to a simple folder of handwritten notes.
Since when did property bought and OWNED by an individual become a "priveledge" as the police treated it in this case? I know the judge has somewhat corrected the issue so far, but what gave those officer's supervisor the idea he could confiscate the kids right to his property (2nd ammendment I believe) based on simple hearsay? I mean shit, hearsay isn't even allowed in the mass murdering terrorist military tribunals anymore...
We treat our own worse than our enemy now?! WTF!?
The "meanie" police aren't going to get you.
"But, Mommy Slashdot..."
The "meanie" police aren't going to get you. Go to bed.
And justifiably so. This entire thing is a joke. This guys lawyers are going to have a field day suing the overzealous assholes involved in this clearly illegal search and seizure and I'd go after the government lawyers that should have known better than to try and defend their actions as well.
If he did what he has been accused of.
And an uncivil b@st@rd.
For the record.
Let's not lose that point amidst
the discussion of the incompetence of
the police in the case.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
And two operating systems! Clearly the work of a terrorist!
Though I detest the injustice that happened to the Boston student whose computer materials were seized, I equally detest the injustice that happened to the other student who was outed (his real sexual orientation is immaterial).
One student may ultimately get back his equipment, with the help of the justice system. But will the other ever get back his dignity?
On the last page of the court order why is the motion to suppress evidence denied? Isn't evidence from an illegal search warrant usually suppressed? Is there some technical distinction between quashing a warrant(*) and suppressing the evidence that I am missing?
(*) And why did the judge order the motion to quash be allowed instead of just ordering the warrant quashed?
It costs more to get your property back than the property is worth. This story from 12 years ago is still happening. Category 270 in this pdf is 2005 budget of $96K. This year the budget is $409K and they haven't seized that much money yet so they're going to have to find it somewhere. I wouldn't recommend doing any DWB while passing through that county - their needs grow ever more sophisticated with time, and next year's budget is even bigger. "These monies are to be used exclusively for equipment, personnel, and training as designated by the Sheriff." Gotta love the name of the budget item though: "Law Enforcement Equipment Equitable Distribution Special Revenue Fund". Because the sheriff taking people's stuff and money to spend however he pleases is "Equitable".
Are we winning the war on drugs yet? Or is the war winning us?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
He's a witch! burn him!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1198771&cid=27578621
This is one roommate sucking overeager and gullible police and campus authorities into his crusade to get back at his roommate. There's PLENTY of blame to go around here.
They have long forgotten (systemically not always individually there are plenty of good cops out there) their job is to serve and protect the people.
Their job is not, and never was, to "serve and protect the people". It is to "maintain public order" - with the bulk of the decisions about what that consists of left to the police (though there's lots of law about what they aren't supposed to do).
There are plenty of court decisions on this. It usually comes up when somebody is threatened by crookies and demands protection, or when the cops take a long time to arrive. The cops have no obligation to protect any particular person (except in very limited circumstances where the cops' actions put the person in exceptional jepoardy.)
(It also comes up in debates over whether private citizens should be able to arm themselves to protect themselves. Those saying "no" often claim that the cops will take care of it. Those saying "yes" point out that there's no mandate for them to do so.)
They now mostly exist to serve government and its all controlling pervasive aims.
Which is what government power always gravitates toward, and why fighting for your rights is an ongoing matter, rather than something a bunch of revolutionaries do and make it stick for centuries or all time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As a BC student who uses Linux (and OSX), I guess I should be a little concerned... I got this email... I think the warrant had less to do with his use of two operating systems, and more to do with the fact that the student hacked into the computer system and sent out emails impersonating one of the groups on campus, and the email had links to a gay porn website, and BC knew which student was doing it. The Jesuits generally don't look to kindly to sending out gay porn to the entire student body, especially at the expense of another student...
I read the EFF article that was linked to, and it seems to me that it is quite misleading.
First, the judge noted absolutely correctly that sending of emails from public email services does not constitute the crime of obtaining computer services by fraud or misrepresentation. Nothing wrong with that. Then the judge said "the claim that such an email might be unlawful because it violates a hypothetical internet use policy goes well beyond the reasonable inferences that may be drawn from the affidavit". Let's examine this: The police had an affidavit from the guy's roommate that he sent emails. These emails may or may not have violated someone's internet use policy - but as the judge correctly said, the police only had the roommate's affidavit, they didn't have any statement from Boston College about their internet use policy. The EFF now states "This appears to be the highest state court to address the question of whether a terms of service violation can itself constitute a "computer hacking" crime, an argument that the district court and jury got wrong in the Lori Drew case". It doesn't. It addresses the fact that the police only imagined such a terms of service violation. They had no good reason to believe that such a terms of service violation existed, according to the facts that they had.
Contrary to what the EFF says, whether such a violation would be a crime is not part of this case. There are two questions: "Did he do X" and "is X a crime". As the judge said: The police had no reason to assume that he did X, based on the information that they had, and that is enough to throw the search warrant out. The second question "is X a crime" was never discussed.
The second conclusion that the article draws is also wrong. The judge observed that the police further tried to justify the search warrant by mentioning that in one and a half lines someone claims they observed that the guy hacked into BC's computers. That was thrown out as justification for a search warrant for a very simple reason: The affidavit never mentioned where the alleged hacking happened. He worked at a university. He could have performed the hacking from his home computer, from a computer lab at the university, from an internet cafe. The affidavit said nothing about it. The police couldn't raid his home, because they didn't actually have any information that the hacking happened at his home!
The EFF claims the court was "Rejecting the Commonwealth's argument that the unsupported allegation of "grade hacking" constituted probable cause". This is misleading. The judge stopped looking further when he noticed that the place of that alleged hacking wasn't specified, and therefore there was no good reason to believe that searching the guy's home could show up any evidence.
All in all, the search warrant was declared unlawful because the police did not actually have any information that would have justified a search warrant. There is nothing in this decision that would be any precedent for other cases; the police just didn't do their homework.
I live in Japan, and let me tell you, that you should never deal with the police, unless you are in immediate physical danger.
Japan has a 93% conviction rate. They like to tout this as a good thing, but here's the way it works: Something bad happens, we send someone to jail. Someone. It doesn't need to be the person who did it.
Speaking from experience, when a call comes in reporting a crime, if they can't find who did it (hard to do when you don't show up until the next day), they'll go after the only name they have associated with it: the person who called. Also, they have been known to have interesting ways of getting confessions out of people, which helps with the 93% conviction rate.
If you mind your own business, you don't need to worry in Japan. Because the police are inept and untrustworthy, no one calls them and they don't find out about anything but the worst crimes. This is good for the Japanese self-image of being a totally safe, crime-free country, but it also means that you don't have Big Brother staring over your shoulder all the time.
Simply calling somebody "gay" (or outing them as) online hardly seems enough to make it a police matter. The police really *would* have their hands full if they dealt with every time this happened online. So what I'd like to know is:
a) Who had it in for this kid?
b) What "important person" was outed as being gay? The mayor or police chief son?
Because without either (a) or (b), I can hardly see why this would have even gotten anyone to even try with a warrant+seizure, even an ill-formed/illegal one.
That's an increasingly dangerous pastime of late... Freedom of speech is not what it used to be now that the fighters for tolerance are increasingly intolerant and opponents of hate overwhelmingly hateful. Even speaking out against gay "marriage" will cost you...
The old sentiment of "I disagree with your opinion, but I shall fight for your right to express it," — is long gone... Consider, for example, the opening sentence of this highly moderated posting.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think it's particularly misleading the way that "search" warrants have now turned into "seizure" warrants. People still have this impression of the police just looking around, so they still have public support - the reality is that you can kiss goodbye to all your electronic equipment for a period of months, if not forever.
Even if it's not necessary for business, the Internet is becoming an essential part of people's lives for communication. Not to mention personal items such as photos that are lost.
Perhaps we should call them as what they really are: seizure warrants.
The real question is: Was the computer returned? I'll wager not.