In AF Holdings, LLC v. Doe, No. C 12-2049 (N.D. Cal. 2012), the court held that a person owes no duty in securing their wireless network to a copyright holder whose works are illegally downloaded over the network. AF Holdings [...]
Cyber Crimes
In what I would call a very significant case, a New York federal court has held that failure to examine a defendant’s imaged hard drive within 15-months after it was obtained was an unlawful seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment. In United States v. Metter, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 155130 (E.D.N.Y. 2012) the government imaged [...]
Cyber Crimes
Remember United States v. Jones, the ground-breaking decision from the Supreme Court in January? For those of you who haven’t heard, it’s the case where the justices held that the installation and use of GPS is a Fourth Amendment search and requires a warrant (read more here). The case is now being retried, and the government [...]
Cyber Crimes
In R.S. v. Minnewaska Area Sch. Dist. No. 2149, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 126257 (D. Minn., Sept. 6, 2012), a federal district court refused to dismiss the case of a 12-year-old against a Minnesota school district for allegedly punishing her for statements made on her Facebook wall and forcing her to disclose her Facebook password to [...]
Cyber Crimes
Volume 27 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology features a student Note by Xiang Li that addresses some of the First Amendment implications of “hacktivism,” which Li broadly defined as the “combination of grassroots political protest with computer hacking through the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous [...]
Cyber Crimes
On Wednesday, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2014. Senator Leahy’s bill, first introduced back in 2005, intends to “better protect[] Americans from the growing threats of data breaches and identity theft,” according to a press release issued by the Senator. Included within the [...]
Cyber Crimes
The Wisconsin legislature recently proposed a “revenge porn” bill (Assembly Bill 462, full text here: https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2013/related/proposals/ab462.pdf). While I applaud the Wisconsin legislature for addressing an issue that has garnered national attention, I interpret the current proposal (unless I am missing [...]
Cyber Crimes
For years, Hollywood has perpetuated the myth of photo and video enhancement. According to Hollywood and its all-too-convenient plot points, a mere click of a computer’s “enhance button” transforms any grainy image into a clear, focused picture with perfect resolution (there also has to be a serious woman in glasses looking over the [...]
Cyber Crimes
This week I would like to draw attention to Orin Kerr’s new article on Mosaic Theory, a theory which gained notoriety after the GPS tracking case United States v. Maynard and was later implicitly accepted by some justices of the Supreme Court in United States v. Jones. I have a personal interest in this topic, since my law review [...]
Cyber Crimes
Two recent partnerships of technology companies are working to combat cybercrime in the areas of phishing schemes and child pornography. Here’s a brief overview of what they are doing. PhotoDNA Microsoft began working with NCMEC in 2009 to create software that could create a hash value for images of child pornography and then track [...]
Cyber Crimes
Cybercrime Review has been recognized by Avvo as one of the Top 150 Legal Blogs and was selected in 2012 for permanent archiving by the Library of Congress. The blog has attracted a diverse audience (with visits from over 180 countries) and is approaching 220,000 pageviews since its inception. Cybercrime Review’s posts have been [...]
Cyber Crimes