By Dan Massoglia
Truthout | Report - Wednesday, 23 April 2014
At a meeting April 7 and 8 in Louisiana,
a group of lawyers and academics prepared the rules for when law
enforcement is allowed to hack people's computers for a dramatic, and
troubling, expansion. Government hacks - the FBI's secretly accessing
your hard drive, email, webcam, and more - which have unfolded in
headlines as a push and pull between privacy-concerned judges and
activists and secrecy-obsessed law enforcement, appear poised to see the
strict judicial restrictions on their use loosened. As is often the
case with wide-reaching changes to the criminal law, the law at issue is
not a big-name bill, like the Affordable Care Act, but rather one more
closely held to the legal system - here, Rule 41(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
The Federal Rules are the procedural guidelines for courts, lawyers,
and investigators guiding important parts of investigations and trials.
They determine, for example, who gets to take a plea, and how, or who gets screwed, and how, by a federal grand jury.
Currently, they place limits on warrant authority in addition to
constitutional protections and other restrictions, generally requiring
that for the FBI to receive a warrant to perform a domestic hack,
computers to be infected must be inside the jurisdiction of the court
issuing the warrant and must each receive a warrant. This concern for
place and emphasis on conservativism in warrant authorizations is one of
the many ways a colonial memory abhorring general warrants has
refracted into the set of legal protections that, inadequate as they
are, provide safeguards on privacy today.
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