4th Amendment Thread

[K@th]

Love Rand Paul. Glad he's okay. Keep fighting, Rand!

[C-Mag]

WTF

President Trump signed into law the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act:

“This bill reauthorizes a crucial anti-terrorism tool—with increased privacy protections—

Hey, we gained a little ground.
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/doc ... mentID=851

[de officiis]

The Problem with Mobile Phones

[Haumana]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/g ... we-thought

The documents released to EFF show that Best Buy officials have enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the agency for at least 10 years. For example, an FBI memo from September 2008 details how Best Buy hosted a meeting of the agency’s “Cyber Working Group” at the company’s Kentucky repair facility.

The memo and a related email show that Geek Squad employees also gave FBI officials a tour of the facility before their meeting and makes clear that the law enforcement agency’s Louisville Division “has maintained close liaison with the Geek Squad’s management in an effort to glean case initiations and to support the division’s Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs.”

[de officiis]

Can’t trust ‘em any farther than you can throw ‘em, as Dad used to say.

[Speaker to Animals]

This is the part that is fucked up:

But some evidence in the case appears to show Geek Squad employees did make an affirmative effort to identify illegal material. For example, the image found on Rettenmaier’s hard drive was in an unallocated space, which typically requires forensic software to find. Other evidence showed that Geek Squad employees were financially rewarded for finding child pornography. Such a bounty would likely encourage Geek Squad employees to actively sweep for suspicious content.

If they just happened to come across child porn in the process of doing their job, then sure, please contact the FBI. But when you reward them, it becomes profitable for an individual to act as an agent for the government and conduct an unwarranted search on every device that comes across his bench. At that point, it's just a violation of the fourth amendment.

I really wonder about the mental health and stability of a person who actively searches for child porn on every computer that comes across their bench as well. I can't imagine you will ever get that image out of your brain once you see it. If I came across it by accident, the dude who put it there is getting wrecked before the cops can arrest him.

[de officiis]

More than 3,300 Android apps are improperly tracking kids, study finds

Thousands of family-friendly apps from the Google Play Store are potentially violating federal law, according to a new large-scale study from North American and European universities and organizations.

The research, recently published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, showed that 3,337 Android apps on Google Play were improperly collecting children’s data and potentially violating the United States Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which limits data collection for kids under age 13.

COPPA gives parents control of any online entity that collects personally identifiable information (PII) from kids. Collecting PII from children under age 13 without explicit parental permission is illegal.

... “Overall, roughly 57 percent of the 5,855 child-directed apps that we analyzed are potentially violating COPPA.”

Using an automated analysis tool to examine app privacy on more than 80,000 apps between November 2016 and March 2018, the researchers determined when private data was accessed and where the data was then sent.

They narrowed it down to 5,855 child-directed apps. These were in 63 different Play Store categories, with 60 percent in the Casual Games, Brain Games, and Educational Games categories.

They found that only a small number (4.8 percent) of the apps had “clear violations when apps share location or contact information without consent.”

But 40 percent shared personal data without reasonable security measures and 18 percent shared individual identifiers with parties for unlawful purposes, such as ad targeting.

Thirty-nine percent, the team found, displayed “ignorance or disregard for contractual obligations aimed at protecting children’s privacy.”

With Google’s Designed for Families initiative, the company had taken steps to enforce COPPA compliance, but the researchers said, “as our results show, there appears to not be any (or only limited) enforcement.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Punchline at the end.

Cell phone location data is now public.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05- ... ation-data

[SuburbanFarmer]

Here’s a fun one. The cops are apparently watching facebook for drug-related posts.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05- ... r-facebook

[de officiis]

Punchline at the end.

Cell phone location data is now public.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05- ... ation-data

Let's face it...we are all just basically walking revenue streams to these companies.