Slashdot Mirror
FBI Seeks To Legally Hack You If You're Connected To TOR Or a VPN
SonicSpike writes The investigative arm of the Department of Justice is attempting to short-circuit the legal checks of the Fourth Amendment by requesting a change in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. These procedural rules dictate how law enforcement agencies must conduct criminal prosecutions, from investigation to trial. Any deviations from the rules can have serious consequences, including dismissal of a case. The specific rule the FBI is targeting outlines the terms for obtaining a search warrant. It's called Federal Rule 41(b), and the requested change would allow law enforcement to obtain a warrant to search electronic data without providing any specific details as long as the target computer location has been hidden through a technical tool like Tor or a virtual private network. It would also allow nonspecific search warrants where computers have been intentionally damaged (such as through botnets, but also through common malware and viruses) and are in five or more separate federal judicial districts. Furthermore, the provision would allow investigators to seize electronically stored information regardless of whether that information is stored inside or outside the court's jurisdiction.
...just a few few days ago? How do you like him now? That's right, he's still smearing turds all over the Constitution, and having him gone will be one of the best things about Obama's terms finally ending.
NSA and others do it and will do it no matter what the law says, while their dime eyed lawyers continue telling that they are defending our liberties. FBI was also doing it, but now that the discussion is public, there are same voices, probably in-house lawyers, who foresee a case in the future where the litigation is lost if FBI will continue lying using the paralel construction, like they (and all others) always did.
So now they want to legitimize something that is not legitimizable.
They don't need to enter your home, locked or not, anymore:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
New police radars can 'see' inside homes
At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.
Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant.
The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.
Current and former federal officials say the information is critical for keeping officers safe if they need to storm buildings or rescue hostages. But privacy advocates and judges have nonetheless expressed concern about the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies may be using the radars — and the fact that they have so far done so without public scrutiny.
So the Postal service is still the most secure legally protected method for sending data. Just mail CDs.
The USPS scans all mail
The USPS monitors mail on behalf of the feds without any authorization.
What's to stop them from opening it without a warrant? Sorry but the whole system is controlled and abused by your favorite government officials.
Sidenote: CDs were replaced by DVDs and now Blu Rays. Just fyi if you want to send more than 700mb of crap.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I'm sure Airbus cared when the GCHQ snooped on the details of a bidding process and handed over the details to Boeing.
Yeah, it's not like the high-functioning sociopaths that seem so well-represented in the programmer population would be at all interested in the six-figure salaries offered by the secret government agencies with access to the most advanced and expensive computing resources on the planet, and may, with the blessing of the government, go crack and exploit all the things. I'm sure the "strike" will be very effective.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Most people seem to have skipped this gem:
That, in effect, means that pretty-much every computer can be entered. Worse, as the user is mostly unaware of any malware or viri on his computer (duh!), he can be searched without knowing/realizing why that might be.
When this relaxing of permission gets granted it would also be quite interresting to see what kind of programs get classified as "viri", or even easier "malware". I get the feeling that than anyone who installs some tools or game and gets a toolbar installed will be easy prey for "the buro" ...
I wouldn't be surprised if people put up honeypots on Tor just to mess with 'em, and log all of the output over serial or something so that even if they get in, they can't purge the logs of their attempts.
Search warrants are still subject to constitutional requirements of reason and due process; this is a procedural rule independent of that.
It will allow a judge to issue the warrant even if the FBI or police are not sure what judicial district it's happening in. It's important to let a magistrate judge approve a warrant on that basis, because the current rule 41(b) does not provide for it except in terrorism cases. So if you have someone selling hard drugs online, for example, but the government can't tell whether they are located inside the United States or not, this provides a way for them to get a warrant to search.
See the proposed rule (from last November) on page 111 of http://www.uscourts.gov/uscour...
The old one is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rul...