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US Says It Can Hack Foreign Servers Without Warrants
Advocatus Diaboli tips news that the U.S. government is now arguing it doesn't need warrants to hack servers hosted on foreign soil. At issue is the current court case against Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht. We recently discussed how the FBI's account of how they obtained evidence from Silk Road servers didn't seem to mesh with reality. Now, government lawyers have responded in a new court filing (PDF). They say that even if the FBI had to hack those servers without a warrant, it doesn't matter, because the Fourth Amendment does not confer protection to servers hosted outside the U.S. They said, "Given that the SR Server was hosting a blatantly criminal website, it would have been reasonable for the FBI to 'hack' into it in order to search it, as any such 'hack' would simply have constituted a search of foreign property known to contain criminal evidence, for which a warrant was not necessary."
So basically they just said that if it does not belong to a US entity it's fait game.
All your transient communications
All the embassies (Considered foreign lands)
Thanks US government for making it easy for me to convince my employers not to chose US data centers.
American exceptionalism justifies murdering foreign people (some intentionally targetted, some as regretable collateral damage) in foreign countries at will with no due process, so hey, hacking into a server with no due process is small potatoes in comparison. And so the Overton window shifts further and further...
The server is on TOR, so the location is masked. The FBI knows that it isn't inside the US... How?
What makes you think a Tor server can't be hacked? Tor is just a network protocol that masks the source and destination addresses of a connection. It is not magical hack-proof server sauce.
In the case of the Silk Road, the server was hacked to do at least one thing: the law enforcement agency added malicious javascript that caused browsers who connected to their servers to cache that script. Then, when the hapless drug buyer disconnected from Tor, the script remained in their cache, and when they reconnected to a regular network connection, the script phoned home from their real IP address. That's how they identified buyers on the Silk Road. But if they've hacked the server, it is not hard to believe they didn't also determine its real IP address.
John
>Non-citizens are not protected by the constitution and have no such rights
Where do you get this idea?
Aliens in the U.S. have essentially the same rights as citizens for many purposes because of the 5th and 14th Amendments’ language, but aliens do not have constitutional rights against the U.S. government outside its territory.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I prefer the excuse to the reasoning. I remember listening to a speech by Bush where he was making the case for war and talking about liberty and it just turned my stomach. The thought in my head was "If I believed that you actually believed a word you were saying, I might be with you".
Its like I always like to point out with the civil war. We know the Emancipation Proclamation would have allowed slavery to continue. We know there were 4 slave owning states still in the Union and any who rejoined before the deadline would be able to keep slavery alive. The war was not fought (by the Union) over slavery.
This is why i dislike Lincoln and call him a terrible president. The country should be able to break up, the several states deserve the right to make that choice. Had the war been, from day one, a war of liberation against slavery, fuck, I would paint that man a hero for the ages....but he didn't...it was a war against self determination.
In the end, you have to seperate the window dressing from the structure and not be so in love with the trappings that you ignore the rotting beam under the floor boards.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"Are you living abroad and doing the hacking at the behest of a foreign government? Then go right ahead, but it should be treated as the act of war that it is, just as any other country that has servers hacked at the behest of the US government should do".
Actually, the USA has committed acts of war against dozens of nations since 1945 - and presumably there is no act of limitations on a state of war. That is, if you bomb a nation's territory, fire cruise missiles into it, assassinate its citizens with drones, apply commercial sanctions to it, or attack it financially, you are then in a state of war with that nation. So every one of those nations is entitled, under international law, to use any weapons or other military methods against the USA.
Moreover, the USA has repeatedly committed the supreme international crime of launching unprovoked aggressive wars. Hence, under the very doctrine put forth by the US government as reported in TFA, any foreign government is entitled to hack any servers in the USA - including those of the government and its agencies.
Unless, of course, the US government believes that it is different from all other nations, and that international law does not apply to it. The view expressed by the parent boils down to "might makes right" - the ancient principle enshrined in the Melian Dialogue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Human rights don't work that way. The US Constitution is very carefully worded, especially regarding where it says "person" or "people" and where it says "citizen" or "citizens".
Here's the Fourth Amendment:
That doesn't say "citizens". It says "The right of the people".