- As Brooklyn changes, so do its juries: “more sophisticated people… they don’t believe [plaintiffs] should be awarded millions of dollars for nothing.” [NY Post quoting plaintiff’s lawyer Charen Kim]
- Richard Epstein: Massachusetts buffer zone statute “should have been upheld, not struck down” [Hoover Institution, earlier on McCullen v. Coakley, my related comment]
- “Runners” as in client-chasing for injury work: “Arkansas AG Files Suit Against Chiropractic ‘Runners'” [AP]
- Fox, henhouse: 2012 law says local transit agencies must sit on boards helping set their own funding [Randal O’Toole, Cato]
- No-good, terrible, really bad idea: occupational licensure for software professionals [Ira Stoll]
- More proliferation of legally required video surveillance [Volokh; guns, cellphone sales]
- How do you expect the IRS to back up headquarters emails when we throttle its IT budget down to a mere $2.4 billion? [Chris Edwards, Cato]
Posts Tagged ‘cellphones’
Riley’s best line
“The United States asserts that a search of all data stored on a cell phone is ‘materially indistinguishable’ from searches of [a wallet or purse] … That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together.” — Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court in Riley v. California, in which the Justices unanimously disallowed warrantless police searches of arrestees’ cell phones.
Feds to control driving navigation apps?
The urge to regulate distracted driving could reach down into your smartphone [Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason; Marc Scribner, CEI]
May 30 roundup
- Gabriel Kolko: “A historian who understood why big business wanted regulation” [Tim Carney, Washington Examiner, earlier]
- Thumbing nose at Hill, Interior Dept. moves to tribalize native Hawaiians by decree [Ilya Shapiro, NACRP, related PDF, Hawaii Free Press, also, background]
- Cellphone 911: “Safety Mandates That May Reduce Safety” [Coyote]
- Liability-expanding California decision: knowing breach of a material contractual provision may trigger state False Claims Act [Sidley] Plus Chamber’s ILR on state False Claims Acts and more;
- Feds to GM: write smoking-gun memos for trial lawyers’ benefit, or else [Daniel Fisher; more on $35 million NHTSA fine at WSJ, National Law Journal, background on Toyota]
- Child-grabbing in safety’s name: “CPS and Free-Range Parents” [David Pimentel 2012 via Free-Range Kids]
- Maryland Court of Appeals affirms denial of class certification over $29.64 wage garnishment [decision in Marshall v. Safeway, PDF via Michael Schearer]
Privacy and surveillance roundup
- “Live or travel within 100 miles of a US Border? America’s Internal Checkpoints” [Wes Kimbell, Reason]
- EFF, ACLU sue Los Angeles seeking disclosure of how automatic license plate readers [ALPRs] are used to track motorists [The Newspaper]
- Would cops run unauthorized background checks on someone appointed to a police oversight board? [Ed Krayewski/Reason, St. Louis County, Mo.]
- “How the NSA bulk data seizure program is like gun registration” [Randy Barnett]
- Text sent to Kiev protesters points up downside of cellphone location signaling: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” [NY Times]
- As New York AG Schneiderman pursues AirBnB, privacy is collateral damage [Ilya Shapiro and Gabriel Latner, Daily Caller]
- Oops! California Obamacare exchange passed along visitors’ personal info to insurance agents without permission [L.A. Times]
“The FCC Absolutely Should Allow Cell Phone Use On Airplanes”
“Should we have a federal law against talking on the phone in restaurants? … If the flying public hates phone calls so much, airlines can be expected to prohibit them. The government does not need to get involved.” [Josh Barro, Business Insider; Ira Stoll]
Surveillance roundup
- “That Thing They Said They’re Not Doing? They’re Totally Doing.” [Daily Show with Jon Stewart] “Exactly What the State Says to Deceive You About Surveillance” [Conor Friedersdorf]
- “Warrantless Cellphone ‘Tower Dumps’ Becoming Go-To Tool For Law Enforcement” [Tim Cushing, TechDirt; Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post; David Kravets, Wired; USA Today (local law enforcement using, not just federal)]
- Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn, but telecoms absent: “U.S. Tech Industry Calls for Surveillance Reform” [Corporate Counsel, EFF, Marvin Ammori/USA Today]
- New Federalist Society symposium on NSA/FISA surveillance and bulk data collection includes names like Randy Barnett, Jim Harper, Jeremy Rabkin, Stewart Baker, Grover Joseph Rees [Engage, Randy Barnett]
- Nowadays “law enforcement can feel free to admit their traffic stops are pretextual” Thanks, Drug War! [Popehat] “Sobriety Checkpoints Paved Path to NSA Email Spying” [Wired]
- FATCA, the intrusive overseas tax enforcement law, isn’t couched in public controversy as a federal data-snooping issue, but it should be [Radley Balko, McClatchy]
Intellectual property roundup
- Books of the faraway past more likely to be available for purchase than books of the 1950s [David Post]
- “Is It Time for a Rule 11 for the Patent Bar?” [Ralph Clifford, SSRN via John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum]
- “Courts In Patent Suits Tell Turncoat Trial Lawyers To Take A Hike — Twice” [Mark Chenoweth, WLF; congratulations to Chenoweth, an old friend of this site, for his appointment as WLF’s new general counsel]
- Federal Circuit: “Model Order Would Cut Patent Fights Down to Manageable Size” [Sheri Qualters, NLJ]
- “Copyright Terms in the TPP: Too Long, or Way Too Long?” [Simon Lester, Cato]
- High tech cy pres and the copyright wars [Roger Parloff, Fortune]
- “The smartphone wars are ending, and nobody won (but the lawyers)” [Alison Frankel, Reuters]
NYT: government has access to phone records back to 1987
In a blockbuster new report, the New York Times reveals that for years AT&T has willingly enlisted as a partner with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to hand over on request data on all calls that go through AT&T switches (which includes some calls not placed by or to its own customers). Included is data on the location of cellphone users, which goes beyond what the government has been known to have at its fingertips through routine-access, unresisted “administrative subpoenas” not disclosed to the surveillance target. More: Guardian, Daily Dot, Business Insider; James Joyner on warrant-dodging “administrative subpoenas”.
Buried at the end of the Times story is that although this extraordinarily intrusive snooping apparatus is rationalized as a Drug War measure, they use it against ordinary crime too:
The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations. The slides emphasize the program’s value in tracing suspects who use replacement phones, sometimes called “burner” phones, who switch phone numbers or who are otherwise difficult to locate or identify.
In March 2013, for instance, Hemisphere found the new phone number and location of a man who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent. A month earlier the program helped catch a South Carolina woman who had made a series of bomb threats.
Not really unrelatedly, it develops that analysts’ practice of using NSA surveillance to spy on their romantic interests — a practice common enough to have its own nickname, “LOVEINT” — comes to light mostly when voluntarily self-disclosed, not because some other safeguards are succeeding in catching it [Business Insider]
P.S. A couple of reactions on Twitter: “Old AT&T slogan was ‘Your world. Delivered’. More accurate to have said ‘Your world. Delivered straight to the DEA.'” [Catherine Crump] “I can’t seem to find the bit in AT&T’s privacy policy where they reveal they have been sharing 26 years worth of call data with the DEA.” [Christopher Sogloian] More: Matt Welch, Scott Greenfield.
N.J. appeals court: those who knowingly text drivers can be sued for crashes
“In a case of first impression, a New Jersey appeals court has held that a remote texter can be held liable to third parties for injuries caused when the distracted driver has an accident,” if the third party has reason to know that the text will be read while driving. The court upheld a lower court ruling finding that not enough proof of such knowledge had been offered to defeat a motion for summary judgment. [ABA Journal, earlier here and here; related, Stoll] A different view: Eugene Volokh.