JTjaden's blog

Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars

(CNN) -- Law enforcement officers may secretly place a GPS device on a person's car without seeking a warrant from a judge, according to a recent federal appeals court ruling in California.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Oregon in 2007 surreptitiously attached a GPS to the silver Jeep owned by Juan Pineda-Moreno, whom they suspected of growing marijuana, according to court papers.

When Pineda-Moreno was arrested and charged, one piece of evidence was the GPS data, including the longitude and latitude of where the Jeep was driven, and how long it stayed. Prosecutors asserted the Jeep had been driven several times to remote rural locations where agents discovered marijuana being grown, court documents show.

Pineda-Moreno eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to grow marijuana, and is serving a 51-month sentence, according to his lawyer.

But he appealed on the grounds that sneaking onto a person's driveway and secretly tracking their car violates a person's reasonable expectation of privacy.

"They went onto the property several times in the middle of the night without his knowledge and without his permission," said his lawyer, Harrison Latto.

State court declares Roseville Galleria's speech rules unconstitutional

A state appellate court has declared that rules regulating talk among strangers at the Galleria at Roseville violate California Constitution free speech guarantees.

A Placer County judge earlier had thrown out the case, finding that the owner's rules of conduct pass constitutional muster.

But, in stark contrast, a three-judge panel of the 3rd District Court of Appeal declared this week in a 43-page opinion that "the rules are unconstitutional on their face" under the state constitution.

The panel reversed Placer Superior Court Judge Larry D. Gaddis' ruling in favor of Westfield LLC, and sent the case back to him for further proceedings.

The specific rule at issue prohibits a person in the center's common areas from "approaching patrons with whom he or she was not previously acquainted for the purpose of communicating with them on a topic unrelated to the business interests" of the mall or its tenants.

CLS v. Martinez: The Supreme Court Rightly Holds that Public Law Schools Can Deny Affiliation and Funding to Religious Groups that Discriminate Against Gay Students

By MARCI A. HAMILTON

Thursday, July 1, 2010

This Monday, June 28, the Supreme Court decided Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, striking a blow for higher education in the United States.

As I discussed in a prior column, the Christian Legal Society (CLS) argued that Hastings Law School (a public law school that is part of the University of California system) had discriminated against it. In particular, CLS claimed that the law school discriminatorily refused to place its imprimatur on CLS, or to provide CLS with the funding that student groups typically receive.

Why did Hastings withhold affiliation and funding from CLS? Because CLS's policies exclude homosexuals from positions of full membership or leadership in the organization.

Hastings has a non-discrimination policy -- reflecting California law -- that extends to "race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation," and it deemed the exclusion to constitute sexual-orientation discrimination.

The Court's decision in favor of Hastings is sound at every level, as I will explain.

This is a good summary of the questions involved in the apprehension of a murder suspect, and new technology intruding onto our lives

Via boingboing

As far as I know, this is the first "familial DNA" arrest in California. There are some concerning privacy implications, particularly when one combines physical data-gathering (collecting DNA not just from the suspect but from relatives or others in the suspect's social network) with the sort of ambient, online data-gathering manifest in services like Google Street View. No one will argue that a serial killer should roam free, or that all available technology shouldn't be used to solve violent crimes, particularly a case involving as many deaths over as many decades as this one does. But how might these technologies be mis-used in the future? Guess we'll find out.

Related: Google admits to snooping on personal data

ACLU to School District: Students Have First Amendment Right to Wear U.S. Flag

May 10, 2010

The ACLU of Northern California has written the attached letter to Morgan Hill Unified School District in response to media reports regarding students at Live Oak High School being prohibited from wearing American flag t-shirts to school on May 5, 2010. The letter criticizes the school's censorship of the students' patriotic expression in light of student speech rights under the First Amendment and California law.

The letter is a pdf - http://www.aclunc.org/cases/other_legal_advocacy/asset_upload_file776_91...

Google's Wi-Fi Spying: What Were They Thinking?

"Don't be evil" has gone all 1984 on us. Or so it seems after Google revealed Friday that its Street View cars, in addition to snapping photos of the world's roadways, have also been collecting sensitive personal information from unencrypted wireless networks.

It was no secret that Google's cars had already been collecting publicly broadcast SSID information (Wi-Fi network names) and MAC addresses (unique numbers for devices like Wi-Fi routers). But this techie data, which is used for location-based services such as Google Maps, didn't include any "payload data," or personal information sent over the network.

Or so "Big Brother" Google claimed on April 27. But yesterday the search behemoth 'fessed up to a security gaffe of Orwellian proportions. Due to a piece of code written in 2006 by an engineer for an experimental Wi-Fi project, Google had in fact been collecting those private bits after all:

The Failure of Surveillance Cameras

When it comes to preventing and solving crimes, cameras are about as useful as a pet rock.

Steve Chapman | May 6, 2010

New York City has thousands of police surveillance cameras, which really come in handy when a terrorist strikes. After the car bomb attempt last weekend, they captured an image of the vehicle driving through Times Square and one of a guy taking off his shirt who looked nothing like the guy arrested Monday.

Which raises the question: What good are cameras? The debate over them is often framed as hardheaded law enforcement types versus wimpy civil libertarians. Whether the cameras actually work in practice to help solve and prevent crime generally gets ignored.

It shouldn't. Leave aside those airy privacy concerns for the moment. Installing, maintaining, and monitoring thousands of these devices, as in New York and Chicago, costs millions of dollars. Absent cameras, that money could be spent on beat cops, patrol cars, forensic equipment, jail cells, you name it.

Know Your Rights - Free Speech, Protests, and Demonstrations in California

You have the right to speak out. Both the California Constitution and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protect your right to free expression. But there are many questions you face when you decide to organize and speak out. When do you need a police permit? Are there things you cannot say or do? Are there any limitations on when or where you can demonstrate? What about civil disobedience? This guide will help answer these questions

Click the link for the guide

http://www.aclunc.org/issues/freedom_of_press_and_speech/rights_of_demon...

Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information

Commentary by Kurt Opsahl

Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook's privacy policy once promised, "No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings."

How times have changed.

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.

School District Allegedly Snapped Thousands of Student Webcam Spy Pics

By David Kravets

A webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district is broadening, with lawyers claiming the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students using school-issued laptops without the pupils’ knowledge or consent.

Some of the images included pictures of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed,” according to a Thursday filing in the case. Pupils’ online chats were also captured, as well as a record of the websites they visited.

When the story first broke in February, the district said the cameras were activated only handful of times when a laptop was reported stolen or missing — an assertion lawyers suing the district say is false.

“Discovery to date has now revealed that thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots (.pdf) have been taken from numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost or missing,” attorney Mark Haltzman wrote in a Thursday federal court filing.