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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/06/24/fbi-doesnt-need-warrant-hack/
A senior US district judge has decided that the FBI didn't need a warrant to capture a defendant's IP address or to extract additional info from his computer.
The case in question is that of Edward Matish, III, who stands accused of access with intent to view child pornography and receipt of child pornography.
He is one of a number of suspects who's IP address was identified with the help of a "network investigative technique" (NIT) used by the FBI after they seized control of Playpen, a dark net website dedicated to child porn distribution.
The NIT also instructed Matish's and other suspects' computers to send information about the OS running on it, its name, its MAC address, and its active operating system username to the server controlled by the FBI.
"The Court finds that Defendant possessed no reasonable expectation of privacy in his computer's IP address, so the Government's acquisition of the IP address did not represent a prohibited Fourth Amendment search," Judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr., ruled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02 2016, @08:13AM
"Seeing" your plate or IP out in the wild, sure.
That depends on what "seeing" means. A person spots your license plate? Fine. The government installs surveillance equipment everywhere in public places to conduct mass surveillance on the populace by automatically, cheaply, and accurately tracking license plates wherever they are? Not fine. The effects that the former has on society are completely different from the effects the latter has on society; with the former, not much of anything happens, but the latter allows oppression and destroys privacy in a way that a person seeing a license plate can't.