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| Webcam wearing a sock. (Photo by Gavin Stewart) |
At a meeting April 7 and 8 in Louisiana, a group of lawyers and academics prepared the rules for when law enforcement is allowed to hack people's computers for a dramatic, and troubling, expansion.
Government hacks - the FBI's secretly accessing your hard drive, email, webcam, and more - which have unfolded in headlines as a push and pull between privacy-concerned judges and activists and secrecy-obsessed law enforcement, appear poised to see the strict judicial restrictions on their use loosened.
As is often the case with wide-reaching changes to the criminal law, the law at issue is not a big-name bill, like the Affordable Care Act, but rather one more closely held to the legal system - here, Rule 41(b) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure...
The Department of Justice's Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules, one of many judicial sub-bodies whose internal deliberations contribute to the patchwork of American regulation and legal procedure, has for almost a year considered the question, via subcommittee, recently arriving - though with subcommittee membership divided - at proposed language that would vastly expand judicial authority to authorize the use of invasive malware in routine law enforcement.
Removing the requirement that warrants be limited to a given magistrate judge's district, the proposed change, Rule 41(b)(6) would expand existing regulation to allow magistrate judges "... to issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and to seize electronically stored information located within or outside that district."
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