Tag • #fourth amendment

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Congressman confronts FBI over “egregious” unlawful search of his personal data

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 10 March, 2023 - 18:57 · 1 minute

Enlarge / Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) (credit: Bill Clark / Contributor | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. )

Last month, a declassified FBI report revealed that the bureau had used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct multiple unlawful searches of a sitting Congress member’s personal communications. Wired was the first to report the abuse , but for weeks, no one knew exactly which lawmaker was targeted by the FBI. That changed this week when Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) revealed during an annual House Intelligence Committee hearing on world threats that the FBI’s abuse of 702 was “in fact” aimed at him.

“This careless abuse by the FBI is unfortunate,” LaHood said at the hearing, suggesting that the searches of his name not only “degrades trust in FISA” but was a “threat to separation of powers” in the United States. Calling the FBI’s past abuses of Section 702 “egregious,” the congressman—who is leading the House Intelligence Committee's working group pushing to reauthorize Section 702 amid a steeply divided Congress—said that “ironically,” being targeted by the FBI gives him a “unique perspective” on “what’s wrong with the FBI.”

LaHood has said that having his own Fourth Amendment rights violated in ways others consider “frightening” positions him well to oversee the working group charged with implementing bipartisan reforms and safeguards that would prevent any such abuses in the future.

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FBI finally admits to buying location data on Americans, horrifying experts

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 9 March, 2023 - 17:41

FBI Director Christopher Wray, left, and National Security Agency Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, testify during the Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats on Wednesday, March 8, 2023.

Enlarge / FBI Director Christopher Wray, left, and National Security Agency Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, testify during the Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats on Wednesday, March 8, 2023. (credit: Tom Williams / Contributor | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. )

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed for the first time that the agency has in the past purchased the location data of US citizens without obtaining a warrant, Wired reported .

This revelation, which has alarmed privacy advocates, came after Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) asked Wray directly, “Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?” Wray’s response tiptoed around the question but provided a rare insight into how the FBI has used location data to surveil Americans without any court oversight.

“To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from Internet advertising,” Wray said. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.”

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Military intelligence buys location data instead of getting warrants, memo shows

Kate Cox · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 22 January, 2021 - 21:04

Enlarge / If your phone knows where you are, the feds can too. (credit: Luis Alvarez | Getty Images )

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence to the Department of Defense, confirmed in a memo that it purchases "commercially available" smartphone location data to gather information that would otherwise require use of a search warrant.

The DIA "currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," the agency wrote in a memo ( PDF ) to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), first obtained by the New York Times .

The Supreme Court held in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that the government needs an actual search warrant to collect an individual's cell-site location data. "When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in his opinion. "The retrospective quality of the data here gives police access to a category of information otherwise unknowable."

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Just turning your phone on qualifies as searching it, court rules

Kate Cox · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 21 May, 2020 - 19:40 · 1 minute

Enlarge / A close-up of the PIN entry form on a smartphone's unlock screen. (credit: Nehru Sulejmanovski | EyeEm | Getty Images )

Smartphones are a rich data trove not only for marketers but also for law enforcement. Police and federal investigators love to get their hands on all that juicy personal information during an investigation. But thanks to the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, and all the case law built upon it, police generally need a warrant to search your phone—and that includes just looking at the lock screen, a judge has ruled ( PDF ).

Usually when the topic of a phone search comes up in court, the question has to do with unlocking. Generally, courts have held that law enforcement can compel you to use your body, such as your fingerprint (or your face ), to unlock a phone but that they cannot compel you to share knowledge, such as a PIN . In this recent case, however, the FBI did not unlock the phone. Instead, they only looked at the phone's lock screen for evidence.

A man from Washington state was arrested in May 2019 and was indicted on several charges related to robbery and assault. The suspect, Joseph Sam, was using an unspecified Motorola smartphone. When he was arrested, he says, one of the officers present hit the power button to bring up the phone's lock screen. The filing does not say that any officer present attempted to unlock the phone or make the suspect do so at the time.

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