The Associated Press reports: Privacy advocates are criticizing a new surveillance system used by South Portland police that reads license plates, a system police defend as a tool to help solve crimes, find wanted individuals, and locate missing people. [S]tate Senator Dennis Damon, a Trenton Democrat, said he is concerned that the system could be…
Category: Surveillance
FBI broke law for years in phone record searches
John Solomon and Carrie Johnson report: The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions….
WI: State’s DNA letter to felons may yield future setbacks in court
Ben Poston reports: A letter being sent by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections that orders released felons to submit DNA samples or face prosecution may exceed the state’s authority and undermine future cases, legal experts, defense attorneys and even one prosecutor say. The concerns are important because the use of DNA evidence obtained under questionable…
Does the Fourth Amendment cover ‘the cloud’?
James Urquhart comments: One of the biggest issues facing individuals and corporations choosing to adopt public cloud computing (or any Internet service, for that matter) is the relative lack of clarity with respect to legal rights over data stored online. I’ve reported on this early legal landscape a couple of times, looking at decisions to…