Alan Charles Raul, who served as vice chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008, has a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post that begins: The Jan. 19 front-page article “FBI broke law for years in phone record searches” missed a key part of the story. The lack…
Category: Surveillance
Text Messages in China to Be Scanned for ‘Illegal Content’
Sharon Lafraniere reports: Expanding what the Chinese government calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run media reported on Tuesday. China Mobile, one of the nation’s largest cellular providers,…
Does asking for a lawyer create reasonable suspicion to search a car?
When police pulled over a young driver for driving without headlights, he immediately asked for a lawyer. Was asking for a lawyer under such circumstances enough to give the police officer reasonable suspicion to search the car? That’s the question making the rounds in the legal blogosphere this week after Crime Scene KC picked up…
Judge Tosses NSA Spy Cases
David Kravets has more on Judge Walker’s decision in two cases involving domestic surveillance: A federal judge is dismissing lawsuits accusing the government of teaming with the nation’s telcos to funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision was a major blow to the two suits…