Case Report – BCCA says aerial surveillance by telphoto zoom lens not a search « All About Information: Via A legal blog about the law of information – By Toronto, Ontario lawyer Dan Michaluk.

Today, the British Columbia Court of Appeal held that the police did not violate section 8 of the Charter by conducting aerial surveillance of a rural property from in excess of 1000 feet by using a digital camera equipped with a telephoto lens. [ Read more ... ]

The dark side of DNA: Via The Globe and Mail.

The only real evidence in a first-degree murder charge against Mr. Turner, the golden sheen of DNA appeared certain to become a silver bullet in the hands of the Crown.

"I told my lawyer, Jerome Kennedy, that there was no way in the world it was true," Mr. Turner recalled in an interview. "He believed me. He said that I was too stupid to commit that crime and leave no evidence."

A lucky hunch by Mr. Kennedy - now Newfoundland's Minister of Health - saved Mr. Turner from a life behind bars. He sought the name and DNA profile of every technician who had worked at the RCMP lab. It turned out that the technician who had tested the ring had also been working on the victim's fingernails a few inches away, creating a strong possibility of contamination.

The technician conceded at Mr. Turner's 2001 trial that she had also contaminated evidence in two previous cases. [ Read more ... ]

The Beginning of the End of Data Retention: Via EFF.org Updates.

Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.

When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers' activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made and emails sent and received.

The response from European citizens was swift and outraged. Under the banner of Freedom Not Fear, mass protests were held in cities all across Europe and beyond. [ Read more ... ]

Italy Convicts Google Execs To Protect Privacy: Via NPR.

Europeans are debating the overall reach of the Internet into their lives. An Italian court recently convicted three Google executives for privacy violations after a clip was posted on Google Video showing a disabled student being bullied by classmates in Turin. The ruling highlights a deep trans-Atlantic cultural gap: Americans see the ruling as undermining the concept of freedom of expression, while Europeans put privacy first — they consider it a fundamental human right. [ Read more ... ]

In Italian Google Case, American and European Ideas of Privacy Collide: Via NYTimes.com .

“On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, [ Read more ... ]

Italian Court Finds Google Violated Privacy: Via NYT > Privacy.

Google said the case, involving a video of bullying, could undermine freedom of expression on the Internet.

MILAN — Three Google executives were convicted Wednesday of violating Italian privacy laws in a ruling that the company denounced as an “astonishing” attack on freedom of expression on the Internet.

The case involves online videos showing an autistic boy being bullied by classmates in Turin, which were posted in 2006 on Google Video, an online video-sharing service that Google ran before its acquisition of YouTube.

Prosecutors charged that the videos violated Italian personal privacy protections. They said the clips were removed only after complaints from Vivi Down, an Italian organization representing people with Down syndrome, whose name was mentioned in the videos.

“We are definitely satisfied that someone has to take responsibility for this violation of privacy,” said Guido Camera, a lawyer for Vivi Down. [ Read more ... ]

Our human rights vs. The Others: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below - Update II)

Ten American Baptists were arrested two weeks ago in Haiti on charges that they exploited the chaos in that country by attempting to smuggle 33 young Haitian children across the border without permission -- either to bring them to a life of Christianity or (as some evidence suggests) to filter them into a child trafficking ring.  National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez is deeply upset by the plight of at least one of the detained Americans, Jim Allen, whom she contends (based exclusively on his family's claims) is innocent.  Lopez demands that the State Department do more to "insist" upon Allen's release, and -- most amazingly of all -- complains about the conditions of his detention.   She has the audacity to cite a Human Rights Watch description of prison conditions in Haiti as "inhumane."  Lopez complains that Allen was waterboarded, stripped, frozen and beaten has "hypertension," was shipped thousands of miles away to a secret black site beyond the reach of the ICRC and then rendered to Jordan allowed to speak to his wife only once in the first ten days of his confinement, and was consigned to years in an island-prison cage with no charges denied his choice of counsel for a few days (though he is now duly represented in Haitian courts by a large team of American lawyers). [ Read more ... ]

British Court Orders Release Of Torture Evidence In Extraordinary Rendition Case: Via American Civil Liberties Union.

Ruling May Affect British Resident's Case In ACLU Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary For Its Role In Unlawful Extraordinary Rendition Program 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union commended today's ruling by a British court that the British government must release evidence of torture in the case of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was captured in Pakistan and detained in Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay as part of the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition program. While in detention, Mohamed was subjected to physical and psychological abuse by his captors. Upon his release, Mohamed sought documents from the British government that would confirm that U.K. officials were aware of and complicit in his abuse by U.S. forces. Today's ruling orders the disclosure of seven previously suppressed paragraphs from an earlier court ruling that summarize British government documents related to Mohamed's detention and torture while under the control of U.S. authorities. [ Read more ... ]

Sweden Probing Cisco, NASA Hacks: Via Threat Level.

Swedish investigators are probing a hacker U.S. authorities accuse of unlawfully intruding into Cisco Systems, NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing Division, the authorities said Monday.

Philip Gabriel Pettersson, known in the hacking world as “Stakkato,” allegedly seized computer code that controls internet traffic. After the 2004 breach of Cisco, the proprietary source code for Cisco’s IOS operating system was discovered on a Russian website.

Pettersson was indicted in the United States in May on five hacking counts, (.pdf) but could not be brought from Sweden to the United States for trial. Sweden does not extradite its own citizens, but said it was examining whether to prosecute him in Sweden after U.S. authorities in San Francisco initiated that request. [ Read more ... ]

Europe Looms as Major Battleground for Google: Via NYT > Privacy.

PARIS — Google has a problem in China. It may be headed for a bigger one in Europe.

So far, no one has accused European governments of cyberattacks like those that Google says it has suffered in China. But on issues from privacy to copyright protection to the dominance of Google’s Internet search engine, clashes with European lawmakers, regulators and consumer advocates are escalating.

Europe matters to Google and its shareholders — potentially more than China. For nowhere else in the world is the company as powerful and as potentially vulnerable. Across most of Europe, Google is by far the biggest search engine, with a substantially bigger market share than in the United States. In a single European country, Britain, Google has roughly 10 times its estimated sales in China.

On a region where the media sector is mostly fragmented along national lines and sometimes dependent on public subsidies, Google’s border-straddling scale, its ambitious pursuit of profit and its embrace of an open, anything-goes Web are raising alarms. [ Read more ... ]

Irish blogger agrees €100,000 settlement for libel: Via IT Law in Ireland.

The Sunday Times has details of the settlement which was obliquely mentioned in Forbes last week:

A blogger has agreed a €100,000 settlement after libelling Niall Ó Donnchú, a senior civil servant, and his girlfriend Laura Barnes. It is the first time in Ireland that defamatory material on a blog has resulted in a pay-out.

Barnes, an American book dealer, made a profit of up to €800,000 in 2005 from selling a cache of James Joyce papers to the state. One year later she began a relationship with Ó Donnchú, an assistant secretary in the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism.

In December 1, 2006, a blogger who styles himself as Ardmayle posted a comment about the couple and the sale of the Joycean manuscripts under the headline “Barnes and Noble”. Following a legal complaint, he took down the blog and in February 2007 he posted an apology which had been supplied by Ó Donnchú’s and Barnes’ lawyer, Ivor Fitzpatrick solicitors. [ Read more ... ]

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Will your big-screen Super Bowl party violate copyright law?: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

An offhand comment the other day by a friend caught my attention—"Did you know that you can't watch the Super Bowl on a TV screen larger than 55 inches? Yeah, it's right there in the law."

With the Colts and Saints set to do battle in Super Bowl XLIV, this seemed worth looking into as a public service. Could it be that some of those giant flat panel TV sets now finding their way into US living rooms are actually violating copyright law?

Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)

Salon Radio: ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

In October, 2008, the ACLU issued a report outlining the policies needed to restore civil liberties and America's constitutional framework in the wake of the Bush assault, entitled "Actions for Restoring America."  On the one-year anniversary of Obama's inauguration as President, the ACLU has issued a new report -- pointedly and revealingly entitled "America Unrestored" -- which details Obama's record in these areas.  Although there have been a few isolated bright spots (the DOJ's intensified domestic enforcement of civil rights laws), Obama's overall civil liberties record has been extremely disappointing, and this report from the ACLU (with which I consult) comprehensively documents the failures. [ Read more ... ]

Why IP addresses are no longer enough to identify internet users: Via IT Law in Ireland.

Richard Clayton has an excellent post explaining (in terms even a lawyer can understand) why the traditional formula of IP address plus timestamp is increasingly inadequate as a way of identifying internet users: [ Read more ... ]

Web Censor Seeks $2.2 Billion for China Hack: Via Threat Level.

A California web-filtering company says it is the victim of “one of the largest cases of software piracy in history.”

Lawyers for adult- and violent-content web-filtering company CYBERsitter claim in a federal lawsuit that the Chinese government purloined some 3,000 lines of its code from its servers as part of software for a national censorship project –- in which several international computer makers are accused of knowingly distributing throughout China.

“They are heavy allegations. Three thousand lines of code, approximately, were stolen. It was a serious thing that was done,” Elliot Gipson, a lawyer for Santa Barbara-based CYBERsitter, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Gipson said about 56 million copies of China’s government censorship software, part of the so-called Green Dam project, were marketed with his client’s code in China last year.

The complaint, which seeks $2.2 billion in damages, (.pdf)  names Sony, Lenovo Group, Toshiba, ACER and, among others, ASUSTeK. [ Read more ... ]

Report: U.S. Fears Public Scrutiny Would Scuttle IP Treaty Talks — Update: Via Threat Level.

The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been shrouded in secrecy, and the Bush and the Obama administrations have declared it unsuitable for public debate because divulging its contents could harm America’s “national security.”

A few recent leaks have showed that the unfinished agreement, which is being negotiated largely between the European Union and the United States, is likely to benefit the content industry. At the same time, it might pave the way for international guidelines that could lead to consumers losing their internet accounts if they are believed to be digital copyright scofflaws.

But we now know that the real reason for secrecy, the one suspected all along, was that the United States does not think it could reach an accord with Europe and the nearly dozen other nations if the proposal came under public scrutiny. [ Read more ... ]

Court Refuses to Shutter Tracker Linked to Pirate Bay: Via Threat Level.

A Stockholm court is refusing to order a Swedish internet provider to cut off a site the studios claim is The Pirate Bay’s new torrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious filesharing website, announced two weeks ago it was abandoning its tracker, which had been the world’s largest — and a magnet for litigation — for years. The move was prompted by the emergence of DHT and PEX technologies, which allow peers to locate one another without a tracker, the site’s operators wrote.

Hollywood lawyers, however, claim that the Pirate Bay’s tracker is alive and well and still being used under a different domain, OpenBitTorrent — which was originally registered to Fredik Neij, one of the four co-founders of The Pirate Bay. [ Read more ... ]

Swiss privacy commissioner miffed, taking Google to court: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Loved by many, Google's Street View feature remains controversial among users and consumer groups who are concerned about privacy. The latest uproar comes from Switzerland's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), which claims Google hasn't taken sufficient measures to protect citizens' privacy and is now threatening to take the company to federal court. [ Read more ... ]

Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name: Via Threat Level.

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.

Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding removal of Werle’s name (.pdf) from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

German media have already ceased using Werle’s full name regarding the attack. Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says German publications must also alter their online archives in a bid to comport with laws designed to provide offenders an avenue to “reintegrate back into society.” [ Read more ... ]

Update on UK Council Surveilling Family Suspected of Living in Wrong School Zone: Via Privacy Lives.

Last year, the Poole Borough Council in the UK targeted for surveillance a family suspected of living in the wrong school zone. The council used powers it had under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), a law targeted toward terrorism and organized crime. I’ve written before about this disturbing trend of local councils in the United Kingdom using RIPA powers to track or prosecute minor offenses, such as littering. [ Read more ... ]

Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits: Via Freedom to Tinker.

One reason the record industry's strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail.

Or so it might seem -- until you read The Dynamics of Deterrence, a recent paper by Mark Kleiman and Beau Kilmer that explains how to deter a great many violators despite limited enforcement capacity.

Consider the following hypothetical. [ Read more ... ]

Advocates Renew Calls for Transparency in ACTA process: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

CDT and other advocates sent a letter to President Obama today once again urging greater transparency as the US negotiates a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). While the administration has permitted some advocates (including my colleague David Sohn) to review the US-authored Internet portion of the current draft under strict non-disclosure rules, such limited access does not allow for full analyses of the agreement and its implications (even by other CDT staff members, much less the broader public interest community). Some leaks have surfaced which suggest that ACTA could require DMCA-style notice-and-takedown and anti-circumvention laws, or even graduated-response obligations on ISPs (see coverage here and here). [ Read more ... ]

Prepare for disconnection! French "3 strikes" law now legal: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

What sort of country puts "Les Immortels" in charge of its language and "Sages" in charge of its constitution? France, of course, where today the Sages had a crack at the country's brand-new, now-with-judicial-oversight version of its Internet disconnection law.

Apart from a minor nitpick, the Sages have approved the law in its entirety, just as France also forced the European Parliament to back down on its own opposition. The world's toughest "three strikes" regime will soon be the law of the terre.

Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)

ISP filches open WiFi in fight against three-strikes law: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

One of the arguments against disconnecting repeat Internet copyright infringers is that an IP address doesn't reveal anything about who actually did the infringing. People who run open or insecure WiFi networks, for instance, might well have "infringement" correctly associated with their IP address when other people use the connection—but how is it fair to disconnect or sanction them? [ Read more ... ]

Music piracy costs money; does fighting it cost more?: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Big Content often claims to be losing absurd amounts of cash to a peg-legged and eye-patched crowd of Internet pirates. To deal with the problem, entertainment lobbyists around the world have suggested that governments might want to mandate "three strikes" laws to punish repeat online infringers, and that Internet service providers should get involved in the battle. But three-strikes rules have their own significant costs, and ISPs are now waging a "bogus numbers" battle of their own in an effort to defeat the proposals. [ Read more ... ]