Tag: Fourth Amendment

October 1, 2018

Apple’s Touch ID is already on its way out. Just five years ago, iPhones began getting the famed fingerprint scanner that makes unlocking your phone dozens of times a day even easier. But all of the new iPhones released this […]

August 23, 2017

The US Department of Justice is backing down on its request to Web hosting service DreamHost to divulge the 1.3 million IP addresses that visited a Trump resistance site. The request was part of the government’s investigation into Inauguration Day […]

August 15, 2017

The Justice Department is seeking the 1.3 million IP addresses that visited a Trump resistance site. The search warrant is part of an investigation into Inauguration Day rioting, which has already resulted in the indictment of 200 people in the […]

May 24, 2017

The Wikimedia Foundation has won another day in court challenging the National Security Agency over the government’s so-called “Upstream” surveillance program that was disclosed by Edward Snowden. While there’s still an uphill battle for the surveillance to be declared unconstitutional, […]

April 7, 2017

The Trump administration is demanding Twitter expose the anonymous account holder behind the @ALT_uscis handle that has been critical of the US president’s immigration policy. The handle has more than 56,000 followers since it debuted in the immediate aftermath of […]

March 17, 2017

Police in a small suburban town of 50,000 people just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, have won a court order requiring Google to determine who has used its search engine to look up the name of a local financial fraud victim. The […]

February 23, 2017

A federal magistrate judge in Chicago recently denied the government’s attempt to force people in a particular building to depress their fingerprints in an attempt to open any seized Apple devices as part of a child pornography investigation. This prosecution, […]

February 16, 2017

Just over a year ago, the US Supreme Court declined to clear up the nationwide legal confusion regarding whether the Constitution requires authorities to get a probable-cause court warrant to obtain cell-site location data records of suspects under investigation. The […]

December 27, 2016

As a tumultuous 2016 draws to a close, one case distilled contemporary law enforcement, terrorism, encryption, and surveillance issues more than any other: the case popularly known as “FBI vs. Apple.” The ordeal began on February 16 when a federal […]

October 7, 2016

Imagine a futuristic society in which robots are deployed to everybody’s house, fulfilling a mission to scan the inside of each and every residence. Does that mental image look far-off and futuristic? Well, this week’s Yahoo e-mail surveillance revelations perhaps […]

April 22, 2016

A judge who in 2013 declared that National Security Letters (NSLs) were unconstitutional has now changed her mind in an unsealed ruling made public Thursday. Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of NSLs each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, […]

March 24, 2016

Today, two representatives from the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee sent a letter (PDF) to Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), asking him to discontinue any plans to expand the list of who the NSA shares […]

February 11, 2016

A federal appeals court is upholding the firearms conviction of a Tennessee man whose brother’s rural farm was monitored for 10 weeks straight by a remote-controlled camera the authorities installed on a utility pole 200 yards away—without a warrant. The […]

April 18, 2015

A federal judge issued a stern rebuke Friday to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s method for breaking up an illegal online betting ring. The Las Vegas court frowned on the FBI’s ruse of disconnecting Internet access to $25,000-per-night villas at […]