Can your teenage daughter’s school personnel lift or search her bra if the whole school is going through a search for drugs? Not if there’s no individualized reasonable suspicion of her, according to a North Carolina decision. Via FourthAmendment.com, from In re T.A.S., 2011 N.C. App. LEXIS 1472 (July 19, 2011): Where the blanket search of the…
Category: U.S.
U.S. Appeals Court: OK to check DNA of those arrested
Rich Lord reports: A closely divided 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has found that the collection of DNA samples from people arrested — but not yet convicted — of crimes is constitutional, in an opinion released today. In a precedent-setting ruling, the appeals court rejected U.S. District Judge David S. Cercone’s 2009 order finding…
New privacy guidelines would give FBI leeway to abuse privacy
Frank Askin, who is a professor of law and director of the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers Law School-Newark, writes: Twenty-five years ago, Congress passed and President Gerald Ford signed the Federal Privacy Act. In an effort to end the abuses committed by the FBI against anti-war and civil rights activists that director J. Edgar…
DOJ takes swipe at EFF over encryption passphrases
Declan McCullagh reports: The U.S. Department of Justice took a thinly veiled swipe at an online civil liberties group that’s arguing a Colorado woman can’t be forced to decrypt her laptop for police inspection. In a legal brief filed yesterday in what is likely to be a precedent-setting case, the Justice Department claimed that the…