Court allows warrantless cell location tracking

[Winehole23]

A former NSA official has accused the NSA’s director of deception during a speech he gave at the DefCon hacker conference on Friday when he asserted that the agency does not collect files on Americans.

William Binney, a former technical director at the NSA, said during a panel discussion that NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander was playing a “word game” and that the NSA was indeed collecting e-mails, Twitter writings, internet searches and other data belonging to Americans and indexing it.


“Unfortunately, once the software takes in data, it will build profiles on everyone in that data,” he said. “You can simply call it up by the attributes of anyone you want and it’s in place for people to look at.”


He said the NSA began building its data collection system to spy on Americans prior to 9/11, and then used the terrorist attacks that occurred that year as the excuse to launch the data collection project.


“It started in February 2001 when they started asking telecoms for data,” Binney said. “That to me tells me that the real plan was to spy on Americans from the beginning.”


Binney is referring to assertions that former Qwest CEO James Nacchio made in court do ents in 2007 that the NSA had asked Qwest, AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth in early 2001 for customer calling records and that all of the other companies complied with the request, but Nacchio declined to participate until served with a proper legal order.


“The reason I left the NSA was because they started spying on everybody in the country. That’s the reason I left,” said Binney, who resigned from the agency in late 2001.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ander-and-nsa/

[boutons_deux]

“It started in February 2001"

hmm, right after head and his illegals occupied the Offal Office?

[Clipper Nation]

I agree, but for who? Do you really think McCain would've been better? He would've just done it out in the open. We probably would be in four or five wars by now.

[Winehole23]

Court of Criminal Appeals bars warrantless searches of cell phones, electronics incident to arrest

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals today held in Texas v. Granville that the Fourth Amendment protects against searches of cell phones incident to arrest. Texans now cannot have the contents of their cell phones and other electronic devices searched indiscriminately after they’re booked in jail. This was a major privacy and Fourth Amendment victory, once again putting the state at the forefront of electronic privacy issues nationally.




As an attorney friend described the ruling in an email, "The primary issue was whether the Fourth Amendment exception that allows searches of an arrestee’s property for contraband also allows a wholesale search of a cell phone. The decision has a good explanation about why modern technology requires heightened protection above that applied to shoes, pants, etc. The decision even cites with approval the recent DC Circuit decision holding the NSA metadata collection program uncons utional." Here's an notable excerpt from the majority opinion:

The term "papers and effects" obviously carried a different connotation in the late eighteenth century than it does today. No longer are they stored only in desks, cabinets, satchels, and folders. Our most private information is now frequently stored in electronic devices such as computers, laptops, iPads, and cell phones, or in "the cloud" and accessible by those electronic devices. But the "central concern underlying the Fourth Amendment" has remained the same throughout the centuries; it is "the concern about giving police officers unbridled discretion to rummage at will among a person's private effects." This is a case about rummaging through a citizen's electronic private effects - a cell phone - without a warrant.

See the majority opinion from Judge Cochran, a concurrence from Judge Keller, and a lone dissent from Judge Keasler.




The US Supreme Court agreed this term to consider similar issues in a pair of related cases. According to Reuters, "The court will hear oral arguments in April and issue rulings by the end of June. The cases are Riley v. California, 13-132 and U.S. v. Wurie, 13-212." The Texas CCA opinion governs state and local law enforcement, not the feds.




RELATED: Amarillo appeals court: 'A cell phone is not a pair of pants.'

MORE: From EFF, which filed an amicus brief in the case.

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co...eals-bars.html