PFA: home computers have no "reasonable expectation of privacy"

Tom Roche Tom_Roche at pobox.com
Sun Jul 10 23:14:13 MST 2016


Apologies to those who've already seen this, but it was news to me:

Last month (Jun 2016), federal district judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr[1] ruled that the Fourth Amendment[2] does not protect home computers. A criminal defendant has no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding an in-home personal computer, and the federal government does not need a warrant to hack one.[3] Particularly, "a computer afforded Fourth Amendment protection in other circumstances is not protected from Government actors who take advantage of an easily broken system"[4] to implant malware. The full decision is in this scanned PDF[5].

Gotta start hardening, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Coke_Morgan,_Jr.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
[3]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/federal-court-fourth-amendment-does-not-protect-your-home-computer
[4]: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/fbis-use-of-tor-exploit-is-like-peering-through-broken-blinds/
[5]: https://www.eff.org/files/2016/06/23/matish_suppression_edva.pdf


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