Navy Guilty of Illegally Broad Online Searches: Child Porn Conviction Overturned

An anonymous reader writes In a 2-1 decision, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that Navy investigators regularly run illegally broad online surveillance operations that cross the line of military enforcement and civilian law. The findings overturned the conviction of Michael Dreyer for distributing child pornography. The illegal material was found by NCIS agent Steve Logan searching for "any computers located in Washington state sharing known child pornography on the Gnutella file-sharing network." The ruling reads in part: "Agent Logan's search did not meet the required limitation. He surveyed the entire state of Washington for computers sharing child pornography. His initial search was not limited to United States military or government computers, and, as the government acknowledged, Agent Logan had no idea whether the computers searched belonged to someone with any "affiliation with the military at all." Instead, it was his "standard practice to monitor all computers in a geographic area," here, every computer in the state of Washington. The record here demonstrates that Agent Logan and other NCIS agents routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate the restrictions on military enforcement of civilian law. Agent Logan testified that it was his standard practice to "monitor any computer IP address within a specific geographic location," not just those "specific to US military only, or US government computers." He did not try to isolate military service members within a geographic area. He appeared to believe that these overly broad investigations were permissible, because he was a "U.S. federal agent" and so could investigate violations of either the Uniform Code of Military Justice or federal law."

Comments

Re:When the cat's absent, the mice rejoice

[cold fjord]

You obviously don't understand what you read. The evidence wasn't thrown out on Constitutional grounds but based on statutory law, the Posse Comitatus Act.

This is the relevant part you missed:

Writing in dissent, Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain noted with apparent regret that the majority was the first ever to apply the "exclusionary rule" to violations of the Posse Comitatus Act.
          Excluding evidence under the rule should be a "last resort" and done only after consideration of the "social costs," he argued.
          "Yet, in a breathtaking assertion of judicial power, today's majority invokes this disfavored remedy for the benefit of a convicted child pornographer," O"Scannlain wrote. "It does so without any demonstrated need to deter future violations of the PCA and without any consideration

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Please stop just making shit up in order to twist a story into fitting your political agenda.

I have just demonstrated that isn't the case. Now can I ask you to do the same?

Part of the problem in these discussion is that so many people rely upon their "common sense," intuition, or psychic abilities to reveal what the law says. Unsurprisingly they often get it wrong, especially on matters of Constitutional law.