
Federal Court: The Fourth Amendment Does Not Protect Your Home Computer - disposition2
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/federal-court-fourth-amendment-does-not-protect-your-home-computer
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mikerichards
At what point are there consequences for bad decisions by judges? At what
point are there consequences for bad decisions by prosecutors?

At some point, judges and prosecutors have to be held account for decisions
that are clearly unconstitutional or against the law.

Where are the checks for these institutions? Appeals courts and whatever
bodies oversee prosecutors is not enough.

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greenyoda
_" Where are the checks for these institutions?"_

The Constitution allows federal judges to be impeached by Congress:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_investigations_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_investigations_of_federal_Judges)

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mikerichards
That's not working out.

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Kristine1975
From the decision (linked in the EFF article):

 _For example, hacking is much more prevalent now than it was even nine years
ago, and the rise of computer hacking via the Internet has changed the public
's reasonable expectations of privacy. ... Now, it seems unreasonable to think
that a computer connected to the Web is immune from invasion. Indeed, the
opposite holds true: in today's digital world, it appears to be a virtual
certainty that computers accessing the Internet can - and eventually will - be
hacked._

That's what you get when you combine the doctrine of "expectation of privacy"
(which essentially confounds Is and Ought) and the insecurity of today's
software.

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whiteandnerdy
Yeah, that's crazy. "In Crimes ville, houses are routinely broken into and
looted, so the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in Crimesville"

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8note
what does that do for the unauthorized access laws?

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greenyoda
The question decided here was whether certain government actions violated the
Fourth Amendment (which talks about the government needing a warrant to
conduct a search). That has nothing to do with a non-government actor gaining
unauthorized access to a computer system - that's still illegal.

~~~
8note
I would think "no expectation of privacy" implies that a computer is a public
space. Wouldn't that make it difficult to say that an access was unauthorized?

~~~
greenyoda
The decision talks about the expectations of privacy of _criminal defendants_
, and weighs the interests of privacy against the interests of law
enforcement.

The information that that the government malware obtained in this case was
metadata, like IP addresses. The decision cites precedents which say that
since the user's IP address is already shared with third parties (e.g., ISPs
and any web site that the person goes to), it's not private information.
Presumably, once the government got the IP addresses, it correlated them with
ISPs' records and obtained warrants to physically seize the computers and
search them for child porn.

In my opinion this is an overreach on the part of the government, but it
doesn't claim that a private computer is a public space, or even that the
government can read files on people's computers without a warrant.

