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
A recently accepted article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law addresses the use of cell tower dumps by law enforcement. A tower dump allows police to request the phone numbers of all phones that connected to a specific tower within a given period of time (see a prior post about the type of process […]
Cyber Crimes
If you are not aware, the author of the DarkComet RAT (Remote Administration Tool) has stopped offering the software, and stopped updating it – a move that has somehow been argued to be a victory for law enforcement, although they didn’t actually do anything. Yes, I have heard of deterrence. However, I will leave for another [...]
Cyber Crimes
The Department of Justice announced last week that they had seized three website domains that were involved in illegally distributing copyrighted Android apps. This was the first time domains had been seized in relation to smartphone apps. The domains are applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com and visitors are now greeted with [...]
Cyber Crimes
A California federal district court has dismissed a case for lack of personal jurisdiction because the plaintiff did not sufficiently prove that the unknown user of a specific IP address was located in California. Celestial Inc. v. Swarm Sharing Hash, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 61559 (C.D. Cal. 2012). The plaintiff, a producer of adult [...]
Cyber Crimes
I was recently in a discussion concerning the type of process needed for law enforcement to obtain a tower dump from a service provider. A tower dump allows police to request the phone numbers of all phones that connected to a specific tower within a given period of time. Beyond this list, law enforcement could also […]
Cyber Crimes
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed an amicus brief before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in an attempt to persuade the court that passengers should be given standing to challenge the use of GPS data acquired from devices on vehicles. Before the court are two cases related to GPS surveillance – Commonwealth [...]
Cyber Crimes
An Illinois federal district court recently analyzed the Wiretap Act as it applies to packet sniffing and held that “the interception of communications sent over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks” does not violate the statute. In re Innovatio IP Ventures, LLC Patent Litigation, No. 11 C 9308 (N.D. Ill. 2012). The plaintiff, [...]
Cyber Crimes
Though I spend a lot of time on the Internet, there is still a lot I haven’t seen. I read recently about “Is Anyone Up?” (which recently decided to shutdown), a website that allowed users to submit nude photographs of others, many of which were referred to as “pornographic souvenirs from relationships gone [...]
Cyber Crimes
In State v. Patino, P1-10-1155A (R.I. Super. Ct. 2012), the court ordered suppression of text messages sent by the defendant on a cell phone belonging to another person. The defendant had standing to challenge the search which, according to the court, was conducted in violation of the Fourth Amendment and not saved by any exception. The [...]
Cyber Crimes