A Boston graduate student is challenging the legality of a warrant that enabled police to search his dorm room and seize several of his computers, an iPod, a cell phone, and other devices.
Riccardo Calixte, a computer science student at Boston College, is petitioning the Newton District Court in Massachusetts for the immediate return of his property and is demanding that investigators be prohibited from any further searches or analysis of his digital data. The confiscation of Calixte's property was spurred by an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a Boston College mailing list alleging that Calixte's roommate is gay.
According to a complaint (PDF) Calixte filed April 10, the warrant issued is invalid because there was no probable cause to believe that a crime was committed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Calixte and filed a memorandum (PDF) in support of Calixte's complaint.
Kevin Christopher, a detective for the Boston College Police Department, submitted an application (PDF) for a search warrant on March 30 and was granted the warrant (PDF) that day.
Christopher said in his application that, following a dispute between Calixte and his roommate in January, the roommate told an officer that Calixte was "involved in some computer hacking incidents." Christopher subsequently interviewed the roommate, who said among other things that Calixte has a reputation as a "hacker," uses two different operating systems to allegedly "hide his illegal activities," and that Calixte had hacked into the university grading system to change students' grades. The roommate also told Christopher that he had been the victim of a mass e-mail incident in which someone sent out attachments to a fake profile of the roommate on a gay Web site.
The police department was later asked to look into the origin of the mass e-mails, given the stress endured by the roommate, and the e-mails were allegedly traced back to Calixte. Christopher subsequently obtained the warrant in question, claiming that given all the information submitted about Calixte, his property would constitute evidence of the crimes of "obtaining computer services by fraud or misrepresentation" and obtaining "unauthorized access to a computer system."
The EFF is arguing it is irrelevant whether or not Calixte sent the e-mails, since the application for the warrant fails to establish probable cause that sending such an e-mail is a criminal offense.
Calixte "stands accused of fraud, though no money or thing of value is at issue," EFF said in its statement of support. "He is accused of 'hacking' merely by sending an e-mail to a list server. Without a crime, there is no just cause for the search."
Furthermore, the statement argues, "No evidence about the e-mail could conceivably have been stored on Mr. Calixte's cell phone or iPod, and yet neither has been returned after nearly two weeks. This scope of the seizure supports the inevitable conclusion that this investigation is a fishing expedition against a student whose reputation and indeed entire educational career has suffered at the hands of a former roommate who has painted an unflattering portrait of him to school officials."
No court date has yet been scheduled to hear Calixte's motion to quash the warrant.
(Credit:
SHARK)
A rodeo association has agreed to pay $25,000 to an animal welfare group to settle a lawsuit over the improper removal of videos from YouTube that showed roped calves being dragged off to die and tasers being used on tame horses to get them to buck.
In December 2007, YouTube removed dozens of rodeo videos after getting takedown notices from the Colorado-based Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association that claimed copyright violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The group that posted them, Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the rodeo group last summer. The group sued for misrepresentation, alleging that the videos could not have infringed any copyright because the rodeos themselves weren't copyrightable, the EFF said.
The EFF announced on Thursday that the two sides had settled the case. In addition to the payment, the agreement requires the rodeo group to run any future copyright claims by its own general counsel and by SHARK before notices are sent to YouTube. It also bars the group from selectively enforcing a "no videotaping" provision against SHARK.
The settlement, which is available on the EFF Web site (PDF), is part of the EFF's No Downtime for Free Speech Campaign, which fights misuse of the DMCA.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Bush administration on behalf of AT&T customers to halt what it called the "massively illegal" warrantless surveillance of Americans' Internet and telephone communications.
In addition to suing the National Security Agency, the nonprofit Internet advocacy group also names President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as well as others.
"For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T's domestic networks and databases of customer records," senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said in a statement. "Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance program as soon as possible."
The EFF said the evidence it would present is the same evidence central to a class-action lawsuit it filed in 2006 accusing AT&T of opening up its telecommunications facilities to the NSA for use in spying on the phone calls and e-mails of "millions of ordinary Americans." Such a practice violates free speech and privacy rights spelled out by the U.S. Constitution and also runs afoul of federal wiretapping law, the EFF claimed.
The ACLU won a brief victory in a similar case filed against the NSA when a federal judge ruled in 2006 that the NSA's surveillance program "ran roughshod" over Americans' constitutional rights Americans and violated federal wiretapping law. However, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit in 2007 on narrow procedural grounds without addressing the legality of the program. The suit effectively died earlier this year when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in an appeal.
In July, the Senate approved a bill that would rewrite federal wiretap laws by granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as long as the government claims the request was "lawful" and authorized by the president.
After the EFF's 2006 lawsuit was filed, reports of a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco surfaced and have become central to the nonprofit group's litigation.
Although EFF's lawsuit was filed before allegations about the room surfaced, reports of its existence have become central to the nonprofit group's attempts to prove AT&T opened its network to the NSA. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein released documents in 2006 alleging the company spliced its fiber optic cables and ran a duplicate set of cables to Room 641A at its 611 Folsom Street building.
The deleted portions of a legal brief accidentally released in 2006 sought to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. (AT&T has publicly neither confirmed nor denied cooperating with the National Security Agency.)
Initial details of the surveillance program surfaced in late 2005 in a Los Angeles Times article that quoted an unnamed source as saying the NSA has a "direct hookup" into an AT&T database that stores information about all domestic phone calls, including how long they lasted.
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