{"id":9788,"date":"2013-11-14T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T10:29:45","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T10:29:45","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=9788","title":{"rendered":"TechDirt: Fourth Straight Federal Court Rules Publicly Shared P2P Data Has No Privacy Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, I posted United States v. Thomas<\/a>, one of about 64 P2P search cases nationwide. This one case, for some reason, caught the attention of writers about Internet privacy. Knowing this issue isn’t new, I did a Lexis search and I estimate 64 reported criminal cases (since 2006) have already held there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a computer left on running P2P. The commonality of this issue is now being recognized:<\/p>\n

TechDirt: Fourth Straight Federal Court Rules Publicly Shared P2P Data Has No Privacy Rights<\/a> by Jason Mick:<\/p>\n

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If you chose to open your data to the public, it is “open and obvious” to law enforcement<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one episode of the long-running reality TV show cops, an officer approaches a person whose car is parked in the street. The sleeping man awakens and the officer asks if he has taken drugs. The man denies that of course. And the cop asks him if he’s sure, and says “Then what’s that?”<\/p>\n

The camera pans down, and sitting on his lap is a bag of powdered drugs. The groggy suspect looks down and his face suddenly transforms into a look of shocked recollection as if to say “how did I forget THAT was there?” “Oh SH-T!” he exclaims.<\/p>\n

I. Open and Obvious for the Digital Age<\/p>\n

This textbook example of open and obvious illustrates in the offline world the kinds of cases in which a police officer can search your property and person without warrant.<\/p>\n

In the digital case, despite the mess of technically ignorant and overreaching laws, one bright point is that a relatively reasonably “open and obvious” analogy is being adopted for law enforcement. Federal courts in the 11th Circuit, 10th Circuit, 8th Circuit, and now 2nd Circuit (namely, the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont) have ruled that the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches does not apply to digital content made publicly available by a suspect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

NakedSecurity.com: Privacy’s gone when posting child abuse images to a P2P network, US judge rules<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My best analogy: Putting a sign on your house saying “whether we’re home or not, come on in and take what you want [literally, take a copy]. If you take something, think about leaving something behind for me.” If somebody comes in, you have no claim your privacy was violated because you waived it as to the whole world. Your intent was to share with others with an interest in child pornography, but that is no defense when the police come along. The computer is running, and it doesn’t care who is coming–it’s wide open to anybody wanting to look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}