From FourthAmendment.com: “The State appeals the denial of its motion to compel a cell phone passcode from defendant, C.J.L. The State argues the motion court erred by overlooking critical ownership evidence and misapplying the foregone conclusion doctrine, effectively importing Fourth Amendment principles into what is a Fifth Amendment inquiry. After examining the record in light…
Category: U.S.
Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms
Zack Whittaker reports: Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals is the latest in a long-running legal battle brougcht by LinkedIn aimed at stopping a rival company from web scraping personal…
Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
Ned Oliver reports: Scott Durvin says he faced aggressive questioning from a Chesterfield County Police detective after his friend died of a drug overdose at the end of 2019. What he didn’t know at the time was that police had also begun secretly tracking his whereabouts by ordering Verizon Wireless to regularly ping his phone’s…
US schools are using smart cameras to target students without face masks
Didi Rankovic reports: A US school district with 95,000 students switched during the pandemic to using its “swarm” of automated surveillance tech to identify children who showed up at school without wearing a mask. The “smart cameras,” produced by Motorola’s Avigilon and capable of facial recognition and gun detection, were catching even those students who…