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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."
No you aren't "bucking for the Constitution of the United States." The case is based on statutory law, not Constitutional rights. The Posse Comitatus Act is an ordinary law passed by Congress. That can change it or undo it if they care to.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I didn't suggest that the entire state of Washington should be under surveillance. I only commented on the application of "scum" as applying to child molesters,
Distinction without a difference.
do you think he might lean towards the sentiment expressed in another of his famous quotes?
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats. -- H. L. Mencken
You've misunderstood the quote. He's talking about being a pirate ("black flag"), about going against the state. That you take it as an endorsement of abusing state power to go after a comparatively minuscule threat is sad, predictable, but sad.
For anyone interested, the paper detailing the software (RoundUp) used in the dragnet can be found here: http://www.dfrws.org/2010/proc...
RoundUp is a Java-based tool that allows for both local and collaborative investigations of the Gnutella network, implementing the principles and techniques described in the previous sections. RoundUp is a fork of the Phex Gnutella client, and it retains Phex’s graphical user interface. Our changes in creating RoundUp from Phex focused on three key areas: adding specific functionality to augment investigative interactions, exposing information of interest to investigators in the GUI, and automating reporting of this information in standard ways.