The case involves Jeffrey Feldman, a software engineer with a degree in computer science from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Suspected of possessing child pornography, FBI agents raided his home and seized 16 storage devices, 9 of which were encrypted.

The FBI filed an order to compel Feldman to decrypt his devices, and order which has been shot down by Judge William Callahan.

“This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman’s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with “reasonably particularity” – namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices. Accordingly, in my opinion, Fifth Amendment protection is available to Feldman. Stated another way, ordering Feldman to decrypt the storage devices would be in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination,” said Judge William E. Callahan Jr.

The Judge concedes that the state knows the encrypted devices contain data, and that they already know the names of the files and that they probably exist on said devices. He also concedes that the state has shown that Feldman is surely capable of decrypting the devices.

But the following question remains: Is it reasonably clear, in the absence of compelled decryption, that Feldman actually has access to and control over the encrypted storage devices and, therefore, the files contained therein? To be sure, the storage devices were all found in Feldman’s residence, where he has admittedly lived alone for the past 15 years. In addition, the unencrypted Dell computer, which showed connections to the encrypted storage devices, has a login screen with only one username, “Jeff.” Nevertheless, unlike in Boucher and Fricosu, here, Feldman has not admitted access and control.

It’s clear that the Judge thinks that this is a very tricky case, and his decision toes the line.

In the end, however, the conclusion is that the state simply doesn’t know enough already about the contents of the drives and the defendant’s ties to them to compel him to access them.

An attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired that “this isn’t just about child porn. It’s about anything on your computer that prosecutors or government officials may want.”

Don’t think that encrypting your data shields you from the long reach of the law, however. Not only is encryption less than 100% effective, but this is simply one ruling. In the past, we’ve seen courts compel decryption – for instance in the aforementioned Boucher case, where a man was forced to unlock his laptop after authorities suspected it contained child pornography.

Underwood, a big proponent for animal rights, says she doesn’t agree with the law, which requires anyone submitting video footage of animal abuse to do so within 48 hours. Activists say two days just isn’t long enough and scares some people away from turning in the perpetrators.

“Shame on TN lawmakers for passing the Ag Gag bill,” the singer tweeted. “If Gov. Bill Haslam signs this, he needs to expect me at his front door. Who’s with me?”

That post, which reached her nearly 1.5 million followers, also drew the attention of Tennessee Rep. Andy Holt, who responded by saying, “I would say that if Carrie Underwood will stick to singing, I’ll stick to lawmaking.”

Underwood didn’t let that one slide by, and instead responded with a new tweet:

I should stick to singing? Wow…sorry, I’m just a tax paying citizen concerned for the safety of my family. #NoAgGag wsmv.com/story/22027811…

— Carrie Underwood (@carrieunderwood) April 20, 2013

However, Holt says the intention of the bill is to bring animal abuse to light as quickly as possible.

“I think what we need to do is make sure and recognize that if animals are being abused it needs to come to justice, and it needs to come to justice quickly,” Holt said. “No matter what anybody tells you. That’s the intention of this legislation.”

Benjamin Kohler was charged with contempt after authorities say he was using his mobile device to text after being given explicit instructions to stay off it.

The judge in the trial, Dennis Graves, instructed the entire jury that cell phone use during court was prohibited. He apparently issued the instructions multiple times.

But Kohler either didn’t hear or didn’t care. During the testimony of a Salem police officer, a video recording was played in the courtroom. That’s when the district attorney noticed a dim light emanating from Kohler’s area.

The proceeding were stopped and the courtroom was emptied. Apparently, Kohler had no explanation for his texting.

“The duty to serve as a juror must be taken very seriously. Every juror has the responsibility to devote his entire attention to the witnesses and evidence being presented. In this case, Mr. Kohler failed to meet his obligations and failed to honor the direction of this court. My hope is that he will use his time in jail to reflect upon his behavior,” said the judge.

Hopefully. If you can’t put your phone down for a few minutes, let’s say, while you’re eating – you may get soup on your device. But if you can’t put your phone down for a few minutes during a trial – you may miss something that could be the difference between someone’s freedom and incarceration. Put the phone down, dude. Nothing you’re texting about is that important, I assure you.

The too-technologically-connected juror has been an ever-increasing problem over the past few years. Just this week, we told you that a juror in the U.K. faces contempt charges after he made Facebook postings about wanting to “fuck up a pedophile.” In the past, we’ve even seen death row convictions overturned due to social media-using jurors.

[Madison County Sheriff's Office via Wired]

According to The Guardian, a juror in the case of a now-convicted sex-offender will face prosecution at the hands of the Attorney General for “an act likely to interfere with the due administration of justice.”

In December of 2012, Kasim Davey was dismissed from the trial of Adam Kephalas in the Wood Green crown court of London. He was let go after making a Facebook post in which he claimed that the trial was giving him the chance to do something he’d always wanted to do: “Fuck up a paedophile.”

“Woooow I wasn’t expecting to be in a jury Deciding a paedophile’s fate, I’ve always wanted to Fuck up a paedophile & now I’m within the law!” he posted.

Although he initially denied ever posting the status, Davey was removed. Kephalas was eventually convicted and given a suspended year-long prison sentence. Today, the Attorney General was given the go ahead to prosecute Davey.

Keeping jurors off of social media it an issue that transcends geography. In the U.S., we’ve seen numerous cases of Twitter-happy jurors, some even affecting the outcome of major trials. Back in December, an Arkansas man’s death row conviction was overturned essentially because one juror couldn’t keep off Twitter. The juror was found to have been tweeting during court recesses.

The EFF reports that CISPA went up for debate before the rules committee. During the hearing, congressmen were able to question the bill’s author, Rep. Mike Rogers, on the more troubling parts of the bill. The entire report is a little depressing as Rogers argued that CISPA has enough privacy protections already, and that the bill’s opponents are 14-year-olds living in their basement.

Those who questioned CISPA at the hearing had the same concerns that the White House expressed in its veto threat. The two main concerns were that not enough was being done to protect private information before it’s sent to the government, and that the bill doesn’t require the bill to go through a civilian agency first. Two valid concerns, and concerns that Rogers says are moot points.

In response to the first concern, Rogers says that identifiable information can’t be sent to the government because it’s all “zeroes and ones.” He seems to be under the impression that the government will be too busy scanning binary for cyberthreats that it will never collect any personally identifiable information from the content being shared with it either. Roger’s view displays a level of ignorance that shouldn’t be tolerated among Congress.

The second concern was framed in the context of how it would hurt the Web economy. Rep. Jared Polis said that allowing companies to share your private information with the government, including military agencies, would decrease the users’ trust in the Internet. He argues that online services would see a decrease in business thanks to decreased trust in their services:

This directly hurts the confidence of Internet users. Internet users – if this were to become law – would be much more hesitant to provide their personal information -even if assured under the terms of use that it will be kept personal because the company would be completely indemnified if they ‘voluntarily’ gave it to the United States government.

It appears that Rogers didn’t even provide a proper response to this concern. He just said that it wouldn’t be a problem and moved on.

Rogers’ response is why CISPA is so dangerous to begin with. Every concern that’s brought up is met with a simple response of “It won’t be a problem.” Such a response does nothing to dissuade fears. In fact, it makes us fear CISPA more if its author can’t even mount a proper response to its critics. In any other debate, arguing that a problem isn’t a problem without the proper evidence to back it up would be laughed off the stage. It’s apparently not only welcome, but encouraged, in the House though.

After providing non-responses to the concerns brought forward by other representatives, Rogers also blocked a number of pro-privacy amendments from making into the final CISPA that will go before the House for a floor vote. One such amendment came from Rep. Adam Schiff that would have automated the removal of identifiable information from data before it was shared with the government. In the current CISPA, the bill leaves it up to the government to remove any identifiable information after it’s already in their hands.

We’re likely to see a vote on CISPA today or tomorrow. The vote isn’t likely to last long, and Rogers will most likely attempt to just ram it through without any more debate. We’ll let you know how the vote went, but don’t expect good news.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation alongside 33 other civil liberty groups, including the ACLU and Fight for the Future, have sent an open letter Congress urging members of the House to reject CISPA during its vote this week.

Earlier this year, many of our organizations wrote to state our opposition to H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 (CISPA). We write today to express our continued opposition to this bill following its markup by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Although some amendments were adopted in markup to improve the bill’s privacy safeguards, these amendments were woefully inadequate to cure the civil liberties threats posed by this bill. In particular, we remain gravely concerned that despite the amendments, this bill will allow companies that hold very sensitive and personal information to liberally share it with the government, including with military agencies.

It’s the idea of sharing information with military agencies that has these groups so concerned. They feel that CISPA would be much more effective if any information sharing was narrowly defined as between companies and civilian agencies:

CISPA creates an exception to all privacy laws to permit companies to share our information with each other and with the government in the name of cybersecurity. Although a carefully-crafted information sharing program that strictly limits the information to be shared and includes robust privacy safeguards could be an effective approach to cybersecurity, CISPA lacks such protections for individual rights. CISPA’s information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of emails to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command.

Finally, the letter questions the need for CISPA at all after President Obama’s cybersecurity executive order, and other laws already on the books, do what CISPA does minus the massive privacy infringement:

Developments over the last year make CISPA’s approach even more questionable than before. First, the President recently signed Executive Order 13636, which will increase information sharing from the government to the private sector. Information sharing in this direction is often cited as a substantial justification for CISPA and will proceed without legislation. Second, the cybersecurity legislation the Senate considered last year, S. 3414, included privacy protections for information sharing that are entirely absent from CISPA, and the Obama administration, including the intelligence community, has confirmed that those protections would not inhibit cybersecurity programs. These included provisions to ensure that private companies send cyber threat information only to civilian agencies, and a requirement that companies make “reasonable efforts” to remove personal information that is unrelated to the cyber threat when sharing data with the government. Finally, witnesses at a hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed earlier this year that companies can strip out personally identifiably information that is not necessary to address cyber threats, and CISPA omits any requirement that reasonable efforts be undertaken to do so.

These groups represent a pretty formidable opposition, but they have their work cut out for them. TechDirt reported on Monday that IBM will be sending 200 executives to Washington as part of a lobbying effort to see CISPA passed. Why does IBM want to see CISPA passed so badly? The official line is that it wants information sharing between corporations and government to be easier, but the company’s president has also flat out admitted that he wants to be able to send personal information to the NSA because the agency “know[s] the most” about cyber threats.

IBM and other companies that are pushing for CISPA could have nothing but admirable intentions, but it’s hard to believe that when they’re all pushing for a law that would give them complete immunity when sharing your private information with the government.

We’ll continue to follow CISPA as it heads to the House floor for a vote later this week. Don’t get your hopes up though – it passed the House with flying colors last year. We can only assume that the House will do so again this year.

56-year-old Laura Culver was sentenced on January 30th to 96 months in jail for producing child pornography. Back in 2001 and 2002, Culver collaborated with a man named Edgardo Sensi to film an 8-year-old girl engaged in various sexual acts. Pretty disgusting stuff. So, an 8-year prison sentence is not unreasonable, right?

Well no, but in this specific case the sentence is being thrown out. An appeals court has ruled that the judge’s actions during sentencing demand that the sentence be vacated and reworked.

While explaining Culver’s sentence, U.S. District Judge Warren W. Eginton reportedly went on some sort of unrelated Facebook-bashing tangent where he ended up blaming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for “hurting a lot of people.”

The records are sealed, but the appeals court, in its decision, paints a pretty clear picture of what the judge was ranting about.

In justifying its decision to impose a sentence of eight years instead of six, the district court referenced “Facebook, and things like it, and society has changed.” … The court speculated that the proliferation of Facebook would facilitate an increase in child pornography cases. The court said it hoped Mark Zuckerberg (who founded Facebook) was “enjoying all his money because…he’s going to hurt a lot of people….”

But Facebook had nothing to do with Culver’s case. In fact, the internet itself didn’t even play a factor in it.

The government argues that the district court was merely concerned about the extent to which various new technologies may facilitate child pornography, rather than Facebook specifically. In that sense, Facebook was a reference to the internet, using synecdoche. But the government does not explain (because it cannot) the role of new technology in this case. Culver did not use the internet to commit her crime, and it should not have played a predominant role in her sentencing.

The appeals court makes a point to say that the ruling in no way suggests that the 8-year sentence for Culver’s crimes is “substantively unreasonable.” In fact, it’s actually well under the recommended guidelines for such a crime.

“Still, that discretion should be exercised without the influence of procedural error.”

What a truly terrible, and odd case.

[via Techdirt]

The town of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana recently voted 8-1 in favor of outlawing baggy pants. The ordinance says that “appearing in public view while exposing one’s skin or undergarments below the waist is contrary to safety, health, peace and good order of the parish and the general welfare.”

Those found in violation of the new baggy pants law will be hit with increasingly more expensive fines for each offense. The first offense will cost $50, the second will cost $100, and every other offense after that will cost $100 and 16 hours of community service.

Those who argued for the law went to great lengths to point out that they aren’t making this a race issue. They said that baggy pants are simply crass, and an undesirable part of prison culture that made its way into mainstream fashion.

Those who opposed the law said that they agreed that baggy pants were tacky, but argued that legislating fashion is a slippery slope that leads to legislating morality. They said it was an example of government overreach and shouldn’t be allowed.

Despite arguments against it, it’s expected that the Parish president will sign the anti-baggy pants ordinance into law. The ordinance will surely promote decency among the young men and women of Terrebonne Parish because baggy pants are obviously the greatest threat to decency since rock and roll and mini-skirts.

[WWLTV via HuffPost]

The Obama Administration has finally issued a statement in regards to its stance on the controversial CISPA bill that’s expected to go before the House next week. The statement, written by Caitlin Hayden, a National Security Council spokesperson, says the newly amended CISPA is a good start, but doesn’t go far enough in protecting civil liberties:

“We continue to believe that information sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the roles of civilian and intelligence agencies, and include targeted liability protections. The Administration seeks to build upon the productive dialogue with Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger over the last several months, and the Administration looks forward to continuing to work with them to ensure that any cybersecurity legislation reflects these principles. Further, we believe the adopted committee amendments reflect a good faith-effort to incorporate some of the Administration’s important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities.”

This new statement comes almost a year after the White House issued its first statement in opposition to CISPA. At that time, the statement was much longer, and tore CISPA a new one. The old statement also ended with a veto threat.

It’s unfortunate then that this new statement contains no such thing. The new one doesn’t even address any of the specific failings in CISPA. It would have been nice to see the administration explicitly state it was against granting companies immunity when they share private information with government, or that it was against the bill allowing companies to share information directly with the NSA. We could assume that the administration, based upon last year’s statement, was against these provisions in CISPA yet again, but its silence doesn’t inspire confidence.

Regardless, it’s nice to see that the White House still has some issues with CISPA. It would have been even nicer to see the administration issue a veto threat, but this will have to do for now. Now we can only hope that the White House finally addresses the CISPA petition that got over 100,000 signatures last month.

[LA Times via TechDirt]

The case comes on an appeal from the Superior Court of Fresno County. Last year, Steven Spriggs was cited for violating section 23123, which bans the use of wireless technologies while driving.

Specifically:

Section 23123, subdivision (a) provides: A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while using a wireless telephone unless that telephone is specifically designed and configured to allow hands-free listening and talking, and is used in that manner while driving.

Spriggs argued that the statute was only enacted to limit talking on a cellphone, and didn’t originally apply to any other use of the device. Also, since the state had to amend the rules later to add language banning texting while driving, it supports his claim that the original intent of the law only applied to conversing while driving.

But the court rejected that claim.

“Our review of the statute‟s plain language leads us to conclude that the primary evil sought to be avoided is the distraction the driver faces when using his or her hands to operate the phone. That distraction would be present whether the wireless telephone was being used as a telephone, a GPS navigator, a clock or a device for sending and receiving text messages and emails,” said judge Kent Hamlin.

Furthermore:

Neither the plain language of the statute nor the legislative history support the conclusion that section 23123, subdivision(a), was designed to prohibit hands-on use of a wireless telephone for conversation only. Notably, the legislative history acknowledges that the statute as worded does not eliminate a “potentially more significant” distraction of carrying on a conversation while driving. The statute instead focuses on the distraction a driver faces when using his or her hands to operate the phone, specifically including “the physical distraction a motorist encounters when either picking up the phone, punching the number keypad, holding the phone up to his or her ear to converse, or pushing a button to end a call.” That distraction would be present whether the phone is used for carrying on a conversation or for some other purpose.

Basically, the law in vague enough to cover any sort of hands-on use of the wireless device. This includes mapping in any form.

Of course, if someone wanted to program their route into Google Maps and then never touch it again while driving, that would be ok. If they wanted to make alterations to the route, they would presumably have to pull over first.

In the end, the court ruled that the law may have been enacted arbitrarily and could very well need retooling – but that’s a job for the legislature, not the court.

“It may be argued that the Legislature acted arbitrarily when it outlawed all ‘hands-on’ use of a wireless telephone while driving, even though the legal use of one‟s hands to operate myriad other devices poses just as great a risk to the safety of other motorists. It may also be argued that prohibiting driving while using ‘electronic wireless communications devices’ for texting and emailing, while acknowledging and failing to prohibit perhaps even more distracting uses of the same devices, is equally illogical and arbitrary. Both arguments should be addressed to the Legislature in support of additional legislation barring any use of those other devices in other than a hands-free manner, or in support of a repeal or amendment of section 23123 to allow the ‘hands-on’ use of wireless telephones for other purposes while driving,” says Hamlin.

As of today, 39 states ban texting while driving for all drivers, and another 6 ban the practice for novice drivers. But a recent survey from AT&T found that nearly 50% of people do it anyway – even though 98% acknowledged that it is indeed wrong to do so. A rule like this banning mapping will likely be ignored by even more people than that.

[California v. Steven R. Spriggs via Digital Trends]
[Photo via ~W~, Flickr]