Author: Paul Ohm
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Do Judges Play a Role After the NSA Call Records Have Been Collected?
Those who defend the NSA’s massive call records collection program point out that although the program allows indiscriminate data collection, it also meaningfully restricts data analysis and use. They note, in particular, this paragraph from Director of National Intelligence Clapper’s June 6, 2013, press release: By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from…
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United States v. Jones is a Near-Optimal Result
This morning, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in United States v. Jones, the GPS tracking case, deciding unanimously that the government violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights when it installed a wireless GPS tracking device on the undercarriage of his car and used it to monitor his movement’s around town for four weeks…
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Supreme Court Takes Important GPS Tracking Case
This morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal next term of United States v. Jones (formerly United States v. Maynard), a case in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suppressed evidence of a criminal defendant’s travels around town, which the police collected using a tracking device they attached to his car. For…
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If Wikileaks Scraped P2P Networks for "Leaks," Did it Break Federal Criminal Law?
On Bloomberg.com today, Michael Riley reports that some of the documents hosted at Wikileaks may not be “leaks” at all, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, according to a computer security firm called Tiversa, “computers in Sweden” have been searching the files shared on p2p networks like Limewire for sensitive…
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Court Rules Email Protected by Fourth Amendment
Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the contents of the messages in an email inbox hosted on a provider’s servers are protected by the Fourth Amendment, even though the messages are accessible to an email provider. As the court puts it, “[t]he government may not compel a commercial…
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A Good Day for Email Privacy: A Court Takes Back its Earlier, Bad Ruling in Rehberg v. Paulk
In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the court that sets federal law for Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, ruled in an opinion in a case called Rehberg v. Paulk that people lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of email messages stored with an email provider. This meant that…
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The Gizmodo Warrant: Searching Journalists in the Terabyte Age
Last Friday night, police officers in California used a warrant to search the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo blogger who wrote about the iPhone prototype found in a Redwood City bar. Orin Kerr has written an interesting post assessing the legality of the search. I wanted to touch on an important issue he didn’t…
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Netflix Cancels the Netflix Prize 2
Today, Netflix announced it is canceling its plans for a second Netflix Prize contest, one that reportedly would have involved the release of more information than the first. As I argued earlier, I feared that the new contest would have put the supposedly private movie viewing and rating habits of Netflix customers at great risk,…
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Netflix's Impending (But Still Avoidable) Multi-Million Dollar Privacy Blunder
In my last post, I had promised to say more about my article on the limits of anonymization and the power of reidentification. Although I haven’t said anything for a few weeks, others have, and I especially appreciate posts by Susannah Fox, Seth Schoen, and Nate Anderson. Not only have these people summarized my article…
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Anonymization FAIL! Privacy Law FAIL!
I have uploaded my latest draft article entitled, Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization to SSRN (look carefully for the download button, just above the title; it’s a little buried). According to my abstract: Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for…
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Did the Sanford E-Mail Tipster or the Newspaper Break the Law?
Part of me doesn’t want to comment on the Mark Sanford news, because it’s all so tawdry and inconsistent with the respectable, family-friendly tone of Freedom to Tinker. But since everybody from the Gray Lady on down is plastering the web with stories, and because all of this reporting is leaving unanalyzed some Internet law…
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FBI's Spyware Program
Note: I worked for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) from 2001 to 2005. The documents discussed below mention a memo written by somebody at CCIPS during the time I worked there, but absolutely everything I say below reflects only my personal thoughts and impressions about the documents released to…