January 31, 2012 Privacy

On the radio: Mobile devices and the Fourth Amendment

I was honored to be a guest on this morning’s episode of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s show Listen Out Loud, talking with host Dave Miller about the recent case of Schlossberg v. Solesbee.

Listen to the interview here:
MP3

We talked about the Fourth Amendment and, more specifically, the exceptions to the warrant requirement for searches made incident to lawful arrests. Some courts have given special treatment to mobile devices when considering whether the information contained on them may be searched without a warrant, because of the vast amounts of personal information that is present.

January 30, 2012 Copyright, DMCA

Fair use, the DMCA, and presidential politics

The 2012 presidential election cycle is already giving internet law enthusiasts things to talk about. Last week it was Ron Paul’s grumblings about an unauthorized campaign ad on YouTube. Now NBC is moaning about a Mitt Romney ad comprised almost entirely of Tom Brokaw on the Nightly News in 1997.

NBC has asked the ad be pulled, claiming it is a copyright infringement. Smart people are already saying the ad is fair use. It probably is fair use.

And NBC knows that. Romney’s campaign posted the ad on YouTube five days ago, and it is yet to be the subject of a DMCA takedown notice. Though such a notice would be easy to draft and send, NBC is aware that the fallout could be expensive. Section 512(f) of the DMCA penalizes the senders of bogus takedown notices. And the courts have not taken kindly to purported victims of infringement who do not fully consider fair use before having content taken off YouTube.

With the election still months away, we may yet see controversial action like we did in 2008 by the news media to disable political content. These situations underscore the problem presented by how long it takes to process DMCA counternotifications and 512(f) actions.

A candidate’s defeat makes these processes moot. So maybe we should hope for a longer republican primary season just so we can see some good DMCA and fair use litigation. Come on NBC, send that takedown notice!

January 28, 2012 Computer Crime, Copyright

Are nonpirate Megaupload users entitled to compensation from the government?

If I left my coat in a taxi that was later impounded because, unknown to me, the driver was transporting heroin in the trunk, would I be left out in the cold?

People who used Megaupload to lawfully store and transfer files are rightfully upset that their stuff is unavailable after last week’s raid. Some groups in other countries say they are going to sue the U.S. government. Would a lawsuit like that get anywhere in a U.S. court?

The Fifth Amendment — best known for its privilege against self-incrimination — says that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation”. (You can impress your legally-trained friends at parties by confidently and casually referring to the Takings Clause.) Does the Takings Clause give innocent Megaupload users a right to be paid the value of the files they are being deprived of while the feds use the servers on which those files are stored to prove their case against Kim Dotcom and company?

Back in 2008, Ilya Somin and Orin Kerr had a conversation on the Volokh Conspiracy discussing this question of whether the Fifth Amendment protects innocent third parties who lose property in a criminal investigation. If you read that commentary you will see that a case over the Megaupload takedown might be tough for a number of esoteric reasons, not the least of which is Supreme Court precedent.

There are some face-value problems with a case like this as well. Has the government taken the property for a “public use”? One could argue that the reason the servers (including the innocent content) were seized was for the so-called public good of going after piracy. But then the innocent content is not being “used” in connection with the prosecution — it just happens to be there.

I do not pretend to know the answers to this inquiry, and I’m relying on sharper Constitutional minds than mine to leave some good comments. (If you know Ilya Somin or Orin Kerr, send them a link to this post!) All I know is that it does not seem fair that users of the cloud should so easily be deprived in the name of law enforcement.

 

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January 27, 2012 Electronic Discovery, Litigation, Privacy

There is no “generalized right to rummage” through an adversary’s Facebook account

Tompkins v. Detroit Metro. Airport, 2012 WL 179320 (E.D. Mich. January 18, 2012)

Plaintiff filed a personal injury lawsuit against defendants claiming she was impaired in her ability to work and enjoy life. One of the defendants filed a motion with the court asking it to order plaintiff to authorize access to her entire Facebook account. The court denied the motion. Finding that defendant had not made a “sufficient predicate” showing that the sought-after information was relevant, and that the request was overly broad, the court held that defendant “[did] not have a generalized right to rummage at will through information that [plaintiff had] limited from public view.”

The court distinguished two other well-known social media discovery cases, Romano v. Steelcase and McMillen v. Hummingbird Speedway. In those cases, the Facebook users had posted photos of themselves engaged in activities that were inconsistent with their claimed injuries (e.g., going fishing and traveling to Florida). The publicly-visible photos that plaintiff in this case posted, which defendant argued made the rest of her account relevant, were of her holding a 2-pound dog, and standing with friends at a birthday party. “If [her] public Facebook page contained pictures of her playing golf or riding horseback,” the court noted, “[defendant] might have a stronger argument for delving into the nonpublic section of her account.”

The court made clear that its decision did not address the question of whether a Facebook user has a reasonable expectation of privacy in so-called private pages. (And there’s nothing in the decision to suggest that inquiry should be answered in the affirmative.) The court also noted that it was not answering the question of whether one could challenge a subpoena to Facebook under the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. 2701 et seq.) as contemplated by Crispin v. Christian Audigier, 717 F.Supp.2d 965 (S.D. Cal. 2010).

Other coverage from Eric B. Meyer.

January 26, 2012 Anonymity

Ron Paul not allowed to find out who posted mean video about Jon Huntsman on YouTube

Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee, Inc. v. Does, 12-00240 (N.D. Cal. January 25, 2012)

(Hat tip to Venkat for posting a link to this decision.)

Ron Paul’s campaign — Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee, Inc. — sued some John Doe defendants in federal court over an offensive video attacking former (but then current) opponent Jon Huntsman. The video demonstrated a gross insensitivity toward Chinese culture, and was posted to YouTube and promoted on Twitter by a user calling himself NHLiberty4Paul.

Since the campaign did not know the true identity of the John Doe defendants, it asked the court for leave to take “expedited discovery” so that it could serve subpoenas on YouTube and Twitter. (The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not allow early discovery like this unless the court specifically permits it.)

The court denied the campaign’s motion seeking early discovery. It held that the campaign failed to show the required “good cause” for expedited discovery set forth in the case of Columbia Ins. Co. v. Seescandy.com, 185 F.R.D. 573, 577 (N.D.Cal.1999).

Under the Seescandy.com standard, in determining whether there is good cause to allow expedited discovery to identify anonymous internet users named as Doe defendants, courts consider whether:

  • (1) the plaintiff can identify the missing party with sufficient specificity such that the court can determine that defendant is a real person or entity who could be sued in federal court;
  • (2) the plaintiff has identified all previous steps taken to locate the elusive defendant;
  • (3) the plaintiff’s suit against defendant could withstand a motion to dismiss; and
  • (4) the plaintiff has demonstrated that there is a reasonable likelihood of being able to identify the defendant through discovery such that service of process would be possible.

The court found that the campaign failed to address these required issues. One is left to wonder whether there is enough of Paul’s campaign left to make it worthwhile to try again.

January 25, 2012 Contracts, Copyright

Megaupload takedown reminds us why website terms and conditions can be important

Kashmir Hill pointed out that at least one erstwhile file sharing service has changed its business model in response to the federal government’s action against Megaupload. She observes that:

FileSonic users can’t be too happy to have one of the main features of the site taken away. But the company must be less worried about its breach of contract with existing users than it is about the possibility of getting the Megaupload treatment, i.e., arrest, seizure of its property, and a criminal indictment.

This raises an important point. Any kind of online service that pushes the legal envelope may want to build in some mechanisms to pull back with impunity if it gets freaked out or loses its envelope-pushing courage. Said another way, that service should not make promises to its users that it cannot keep in the event the service wants to change what it is doing.

Some well known user generated content sites do this pretty well already in their terms of service. For example:

  • Dropbox: “We reserve the right to suspend or end the Services at any time, with or without cause, and with or without notice.”
  • “YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time.”
  • Reddit: “We also reserve the right to discontinue the Program, or change the content or formatting of the Program, at any time without notice to you, and to require the immediate cessation of any specific use of the Program.”
  • Facebook (being kind of vague): “If you . . . create risk or possible legal exposure for us, we can stop providing all or part of Facebook to you.”

All good examples of foresight in drafting website terms and conditions that help innovative sites with damage control.

January 24, 2012 Computer Crime, Privacy

Ordering defendant to decrypt hard drive did not violate her Fifth Amendment rights

U.S. v. Fricosu, 10-CR-00509 (D. Colo. January 23, 2012)

Pursuant to a warrant, federal agents seized defendant’s laptop from her home. When investigators turned it on, they saw the hard drive’s contents were encrypted using PGP Desktop. Defendant would not voluntarily turn over the password to decrypt the drive, so the Government filed an application under the All Writs Act to require defendant to “assist” in the execution of the search warrant. Defendant objected, asserting her privilege against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment.

The court rejected defendant’s arguments, granted the Government’s application and ordered defendant to provide an unencrypted copy of the hard drive. It found that the situation did not implicate defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights.

The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall be compelled in any
criminal case to be a witness against himself. For the most part, this privilege only covers testimony. But an act that implicitly communicates a statement of fact may be within the purview of the privilege as well. For example, producing a document (or electronic data, for that matter) is an acknowledgment that the material:

  • exists
  • is in the possession or control of the producer
  • is authentic (i.e., is what it purports to be)

The court held that defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights were not implicated because providing an unencrypted copy of the hard drive did not serve to accomplish any of the three points listed above.

The feds had confiscated the computer, so they knew of the location and existence of the computer files. (The court found that the fact that investigators did not know the specific content of any specific files on the computer did not matter.) And as for the authenticity of the computer files, the government would presumably be able to do that in other ways. Among other things, the computer was found in defendant’s bedroom. Information on the screen that showed up when it was turned on contained defendant’s first name. And perhaps most damningly, investigators had a taped phone conversation between defendant and her ex-husband discussing the computer and the fact it was password protected.

January 23, 2012 Privacy

Supreme Court: GPS device attached to car was an unconstitutional search

U.S. v. Jones, 565 U.S. ___ (2012)

Decision looks to 18th century sensibilities on the sanctity of personal property to resolve modern day legal problem occasioned by technology.

Today the Supreme Court issued its opinion in U.S. v. Jones, which addresses the question of whether it was a “search or seizure” under the Fourth Amendment when the police attached a GPS tracking device to a drug suspect’s car. The information gathered from the device was used to convict defendant and send him to prison for life.

An originalist kind of opinion

Justice Scalia authored an opinion (which four other justices, including Roberts and Thomas, joined) holding that the placement of the GPS device on defendant’s car was a “physical intrusion [which] would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.” Because the device was placed on the car outside the scope of the warrant authorizing it (after the warrant’s expiration and outside its geographic jurisdiction), defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

Property is key

Key to Court’s opinion was the Fourth Amendment’s close connection to property. Historically, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has been tied to the concept of common-law trespass. Later cases, such as Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967) deviated from that approach, looking more to a personal interest, namely one’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Reasonable expectation of privacy does not matter here

The Government had argued that there was no search here because defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the underbody of his car, nor in the information about the public places he went. The court rejected that argument. Instead, it observed that “[a]t bottom, we must ‘assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”

This “at bottom” analysis meant looking to the property interest defendant had (as informed by principles of common law trespass). By attaching the device to defendant’s car, the officers encroached on a protected area.

Open questions about information tracking

The case involved more than the mere transmission of electronic signals. In dicta, the court noted that in cases that do not involve physical intrusion, the Katz “reasonable expectation of privacy” analysis would apply. And the court was able to skirt the thorny question of whether the pervasive gathering of information while assisted by technology (something that it would take an army of agents and vehicles to accomplish) would be unconstitutional:

It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question.

Many commentators have observed that the case bears similarities to United States v. Knotts, 460 U. S. 276 (1982) which involved a location-transmitting “beeper” that was placed in a canister of chloroform, which made its way into the defendant’s trunk. In Knotts, the Court held that the gathering of location information in such a fashion did not violate the Fourth Amendment. The Jones case is different — in Knotts, the cops were not reponsible for placing the canister into the vehicle. Here, the cops actually had to encroach on defendant’s property (and even changed the batteries on the device at a later date).

The Court’s decision comes as a relief to those who worried about the Orwellian-like consequences of a Government victory. It appears that all of us — including the Justices of the Supreme Court themselves — are free from indiscriminate government surveilance of this sort. It will be interesting to go back and watch This Week in Law Episode 137, where we discussed this case and its issues.

What do you think? Was the court correct in looking at 18th century doctrines to solve a 21st century problem? Let’s have a conversation below.

January 22, 2012 Privacy

Cops violated Fourth Amendment in warrantless search of digital camera

Schlossberg v. Solesbee, 2012 WL 141741 (D.Or. January 18, 2012)

Plaintiff was being questioned by defendant police officer when defendant noticed plaintiff was using a digital camera to capture the exchange. The cop got enraged and took the camera away. He arrested plaintiff and looked through the files on the camera without getting a warrant.

So plaintiff filed a civil rights lawsuit. Before trial, the court asked the parties to file briefs on whether plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated. The court found that the warrantless search of the camera was an unlawful search incident to an arrest, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment.

In its decision, the court noted that cases which have allowed warrantless searches of electronic devices incident to arrest established a dangerous new rule, namely, that any citizen committing even the most minor arrestable offense is at risk of having his or her most intimate information viewed by an arresting officer. The court recounted the case of some cops who, in a warrantless search of a drunk driving suspect’s cell phone, found and shared some naked photos of the suspect’s girlfriend. See Newhard v. Borders, 649 F.Supp.2d 440 (W.D. Va 2009).

The court disagreed with the rationale of previous cases that held electronic devices such as phones and cameras were like “closed containers” and were thereby subject to warrantless searches. It found that warrantless searches of electronic devices are not reasonable when they are incident to a valid arrest absent a showing that the search is necessary to:

  • prevent the destruction of evidence
  • ensure officer safety, or
  • address other exigent circumstances

The court further found that all electronic devices should be subject to this broad protection — police should not have to distinguish between laptops, traditional cell phones, smart phones and cameras before deciding whether to proceed with a search of the device incident to arrest.

In sum, the court found that because plaintiff had a high expectation of privacy in his camera’s contents, defendant should not have reviewed its contents in a search incident to the arrest. He should have gotten a warrant instead.

So what do you think? Did the court get this one right?

January 20, 2012 Copyright

If you critique SOPA, read the text. If you read the text, read it right.

Earlier this week Eriq Gardner speculated in a tweet that less than one tenth of one percent of folks have actually read the SOPA legislation. I bet he’s right. It’s good to read the statute. But what might be worse than not reading it is reading it wrongly and thereafter propagating misunderstanding.

One of the motifs that has permeated the SOPA discussion is this idea that evil (usually corporate) interests could shut down entire, innocent sites based on one piece of user generated content on that site that is, or links to, infringing material.

Some commentators, such as the usually astute Khan Academy in the video embedded below, have gone so far as to say that one little transgression by one user could bring down all of Facebook, YouTube, or Vimeo. (That discussion begins at about the 5:00 mark where the narrator purports to parse the language of Section 103 of SOPA.)

We are fortunate to have the means and motivation to rally around an issue like SOPA and make it a topic of worldwide discussion. But it turns unfortunate when some of the loudest criticism is based on misinformation. That’s happening now.

It is silly to think that one person could bring down Facebook and leave its almost a billion users in the dark. It is silly to think that Congress would enact legislation making that possible. Those thoughts are silly because they are not based on reality. One user could not cause Facebook to be shut down, and SOPA does provide content owners with a way to accomplish that.

If you take a close look at SOPA, (and of course you should) you see that this “one person taking down Facebook” conclusion is not supported by the language of the statute.

If a federal judge is convinced that a site is “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property,” then he or she can enter an injunction (according to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and all the case law attendant thereto) shutting down that site’s domain name.

The present misunderstanding comes from a reading of SOPA’s definition in Section 103 of what it means for a site to be “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.” That definition is much narrower than what other commentators would have you believe. Among other things, the site has to be:

  • primarily designed or operated for the purpose of offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates infringement, circumvention or counterfeiting,
  • have only limited purpose or use other than offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates infringement, circumvention or counterfeiting, or
  • be marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates infringement, circumvention or counterfeiting.

A less-than-careful reading leads one to think that the definition brings in any site that enables or facilitates infringement, circumvention or counterfeiting. Read the definition again. Is Facebook primarily designed to rip off US property? Is it used for only a little more (i.e., does it have a limited purpose) other than to enable or promote piracy? Does Mark Zuckerberg say that is what it is for? Because the answers to these questions are no, no and no, a federal judge would not conclude that Facebook is a site dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.

If that federal judge were to so conclude, then he would likely be smoking dope. And if that is the state of affairs, then our problem is not SOPA, but federal judges smoking dope.

The fervent opposition to SOPA leads one to be reminded, like David Newhoff was in this piece, of the “death panel” hyperbole that surrounded the healthcare debate. It might be the same part of the brain at work that caused all the irrationality in Vancouver after the Stanley Cup. I’m just sayin’.

Principled and reasonable debate is awesome. Misguided arguments waste everyone’s time.

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