Can the US Seize Botnets and Data Overseas Without A Warrant?

It sounds like a classic law school exam question. A border patrol agent in the United States, without adequate provocation or justification, fires a shot across the Mexican border, hitting an innocent Mexican teenager in the head – killing him. Does the family of the deceased have any recourse in the U.S. courts, specifically under…

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Judge Gorsuch and Technology (and Privacy)

When Walter Ackerman sent an email from his AOL account to someone else, it never arrived.  It never arrived because AOL’s computers examined the contents of the email, using an MD5 hash function, and determined that one of the attachments’ electronic signature matched that of suspected child pornography contained in a database maintained by the…

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I’ll Trade You a Mantle Rookie Card for Two Cyber Vulnerabilities

President Trump is slated to issue two Executive Orders this week which may relate to the ability of the nation to defend itself (and its critical infrastructure) from potential cyberattacks.  The first is the President’s Executive order on cybersecurity.  The second is the Executive Order on Regulatio.  It may be that these orders work contrary to each other in practice.  We will…

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Alexa, How Do You Hide a Dead Body?

A recent report has indicated that police have subpoenaed records from Amazon to get the cloud stored audio files from an Amazon Echo to help solve a murder case. This points out a disturbing trend in privacy. It’s not that the government is surveilling us.  It’s that we are surveilling ourselves in newer and more…

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FTC versus IoT

For the Internet of Things (IoT) to be useful, some sensing device has to collect data, and transmit that data over the Internet (typically) to a cloud server (typically) that will store and analyze that data and allow the user to see that data, and/or use the data to effect some change in the device…

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