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posted by mrpg on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the smoke-gets-in-your-home dept.

TechCrunch:

You can tell a lot about what's going on in a home from how much electricity it's using — especially when that information is collected every few minutes and recorded centrally. It's revealing enough that a federal judge has ruled that people with smart meters have a reasonable expectation of privacy and as such law enforcement will require a warrant to acquire that data.

It may sound like a niche win in the fight for digital privacy, and in a way it is, but it's still important. One of the risks we've assumed as consumers in adopting ubiquitous technology in forms like the so-called Internet of Things is that we are generating an immense amount of data we weren't before, and that data is not always protected as it should be.

This case is a great example. Traditional spinning meters are read perhaps once a month by your local utility, and at that level of granularity there's not much you can tell about a house or apartment other than whether perhaps someone has been living there and whether they have abnormally high electricity use — useful information if you were, say, looking for illicit pot growers with a farm in the basement.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:50PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:50PM (#725301) Journal

    Massachusetts tracks pot plants with helicopters [commonwealthmagazine.org]

    MASSACHUSETTS DECRIMINALIZED MARIJUANA in 2008, legalized medical marijuana in 2012, and is about to vote on legalizing recreational marijuana, but that hasn’t stopped the State Police and the National Guard from launching helicopter-led raids on homeowners growing pot in their backyards.

    What makes the raids unusual is that they are conducted without warrants and rarely lead to arrests. National Guard helicopters swoop in low, spot marijuana plants, and then signal State Police on the ground who rush in, cut down the pot plants, and leave.

    Massachusetts cops raided an 81-year-old’s home to cut down a single medical marijuana plant [vox.com]

    If you were trying to come up with a headline that perfectly demonstrated why so many people have turned against keeping marijuana illegal, you probably couldn’t do better than this real headline from the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Massachusetts: “Raid! National Guard, State Police descend on 81-year-old’s property to seize single pot plant.”

    The story is just as absurd as it sounds. On September 21, the Massachusetts National Guard and State Police descended on 81-year-old Margaret Holcomb's home in Amherst using a military-style helicopter to chop down a single marijuana plant that they claim was in “plain view.” The raid was part of a broader operation in which police seized 44 plants in Massachusetts homes, with none of the property owners charged with anything — just their plants taken and destroyed.

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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:14PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:14PM (#725321) Journal