Mediaboss Marketing

June 8, 2017

The law dictates when enforcement officers need a warrant for searches and when they dont. Where do the protections of the Fourth Amendment apply and where do they not.

Technologys rapidly changing capabilities present a constant need for constitutional protections to be guided by updated rule of law.

In June 2014, the Supreme Court expanded the law to address privacy concerns in the digital age. In Riley v. California, the justices decided a warrant is needed to search cellphones seized from someone who has been arrested. They knew when they ruled that they werent just talking about a flip phone with a few photos and a contact list. It was a landmark ruling.

In that 2014 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: The term cell phone is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps or newspapers.

Roberts likened it to ransacking a persons home. Indeed, a cellphone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form.

An example he gave: past location information, now a standard feature.

The court will decide whether law enforcement authorities need a warrant to gather cellphone data from cellphone companies.

The case, Carpenter v. U.S., involves a convicted robber named Timothy Carpenter, who was found guilty partly on the basis of months of cellphone location records turned over without a warrant.

The justices know that technology now gives government the ability to rummage through more than cars, closets, bedroom drawers and smartphone photos. Technology gives enforcement the ability to look at a persons entire life, personal and otherwise, under an amazingly invasive digital microscope. Where and when do you need a warrant for that?

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court conferences on 159 petitions for review and OOIDAs ELD mandate case is one of them. How does OOIDAs ELD case relate? Youve probably already put the dots together. The issues differ fromthose in OOIDAs ELD case. But the courts interest in the gathering of data from electronic devices is significant.

See more here:
Brushing up on landmark Fourth Amendment cases - Land Line Magazine

The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, as seen from the air, January 29, 2010. Saul LoebAFP/Getty Images

For more than a year, U.S. intelligence officials reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrant-less surveillance law intended to target foreigners overseas.

This week, the Trump administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil liberties advocates who say it is critical to know as Congress weighs changes to a law expiring at the end of the year that permits some of the National Security Agency's most sweeping espionage.

"The NSA has made Herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate," Dan Coats, a career Republican politician appointed by Republican President Donald Trump as the top U.S. intelligence official, testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday.

Coats said "it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person's communications may be collected" under the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that even if he dedicated more resources the NSA would not be able to calculate an estimate, which privacy experts have said could be in the millions.

The statement ran counter to what senior intelligence officials had previously promised both publicly and in private briefings during the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, lawmakers and congressional staffers working on drafting reforms to Section 702 said.

Representative John Conyers, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, said that for many months intelligence agencies "expressly promised" members of both parties to deliver the estimated number to them.

Senior intelligence officials had also previously said an estimate could be delivered. In March, then NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, said "yes" when asked by a Reuters reporter if an estimate would be provided this year.

"Were working on that with the Congress and we'll come to a satisfactory resolution, because we have to," said Ledgett, who has since retired from public service.

The law allows U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on and collect vast amounts of digital communications from foreign suspects living outside of the United States, but often incidentally scoops up communications of Americans.

The decision to scrap the estimate is likely to complicate a debate in Congress over whether to curtail certain aspects of the surveillance law, congressional aides said. Congress must vote to renew Section 702 to avoid its expiration on Dec. 31.

Privacy issues often scramble traditional party lines, but there are signs that Section 702's renewal will be even more politically unpredictable.

Get Data Sheet , Fortunes technology newsletter.

Some Republicans who usually support surveillance programs have expressed concerns about Section 702, in part because they are worried about leaks of intercepts of conversations between Trump associates and Russian officials amid investigations of possible collusion.

U.S. intelligence agencies last year accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election campaign, allegations Moscow denies. Trump denies there was collusion. Intelligence officials have said Section 702 was not directly connected to surveillance related to those leaks.

For more about the NSA, watch :

"As big a fan as I am of collection, incidental collection, I'm not going to reauthorize a program that could be politically manipulated," Senator Lindsey Graham, usually a defender of U.S. surveillance activities, told reporters this week.

Graham was among 14 Republican senators, including every Republican member of the intelligence panel, who on Tuesday introduced a bill supported by the White House and top intelligence chiefs, that would renew Section 702 without changes and make it permanent.

Critics have called the process under which the FBI and other agencies can query the pool of data collected for U.S. information a "backdoor search loophole" that evades traditional warrant requirements.

"How can we accept the government's reassurance that our privacy is being protected when the government itself has no idea how many Americans' communications are being swept up and stored?" said Liza Goitein, a privacy expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Read the rest here:
NSA Backtracks on Sharing Number of Americans Caught In Warrantless Spying - Fortune

Augusta

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has called on his supporters to rally to the side of the 25-year-old suspect in the National Security Agency leak investigation here.

Assange, who has drawn a mixture of praise and scorn for his role in the disclosure of highly classified U.S. intelligence information, tweeted this week: Alleged NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner must be supported. She is a young women [sic] accused of courage in trying to help us know. He also tweeted that Winner, a U.S. Air Force veteran, is against the wall for talking to the press.

It doesn't matter why she did it or the quality (of) the report, said Assange, who jumped his bail and sought asylum in Ecuador to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape accusations. Swedish prosecutors have since announced they were dropping the rape inquiry and no longer seeking to extradite him. Assange has denied the allegations. Acts of non-elite sources communicating knowledge should be strongly encouraged.

Assistant U.S. attorney Jennifer Solari highlighted Assanges support for Winner while pushing Thursday to keep her in jail until her trial. U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps ultimately denied Winners release on bond, citing the nature of the crime, the weight of the evidence, her history and the potential danger to the community.

A federal grand jury has indicted Winner on a single count of "willful retention and transmission of national defense information. Winner faces up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines, plus up to three years of supervised release and a $100 special assessment. Winner pleaded not guilty to the charge Thursday.

Filed this week, the six-page federal indictment says Winner worked as a federal contractor at a U.S. government agency in Georgia between February and June and had a top-secret security clearance. On about May 9, the indictment says, Winner printed and removed a May 5 report on intelligence activities by a foreign government directed at targets within the United States. Two days later, she sent a copy of the report to an online news outlet.

The U.S. Justice Department announced Winners arrest Monday, about an hour after The Intercept reported that it had obtained a top-secret NSA report about Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. The report says Russian military intelligence officials tried to hack into the U.S. voting system just before last Novembers election.

Reality Leigh Winner is the first person to be charged with leaking confidential information during the Trump administration.

Go here to read the rest:
WikiLeaks founder supporting NSA leak suspect in Georgia - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Sen. Rand Paul said Friday that the Russia and Flynn investigation also needs to look into reining in leaks at the National Security Agency.

We need to get to the bottom of who was listening to General Flynns conversations because leaking that is a felony and very dangerous to the republic,the Kentucky Republican said on Fox News.

I hope the special counsel will also be looking at this because I dont think Americans want to live in a society where the government becomes so powerful that its listening to all of our phone calls or reading all of our emails.

Mr. Paul said he hoped that special counsel Robert Mueller would be able to answer who leaked such information since the investigation would take place in a private setting.

Im guessing the special counsels ability to bring people in can be better than a committee. And sometimes you can find the truth a little better because a grand jury or a special counsel works behind closed doors.

Go here to read the rest:
Rand Paul argues Flynn leaks highlight need to rein in NSA ... - Washington Times

A new online tool offers GPs help in diagnosing genetic illness.

Heath Korvola / getty

Everyone is born with a few hundred genetic typos studded throughout their genome. Most of these are inconsequential. But for a person with an unexplained genetic disease, these glitches could hold the answers to their mysterious condition.

A new software tool, developed by Raony Cardenas and colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, could help doctors to pinpoint which genetic glitch is responsible for a patients disease, according to a study published in PLoS Computational Biology.

Since the Human Genome Project announced it had decoded the 3.2 billion chemical letters of our genome in 2003, the price of genome sequencing has plummeted.

Hospitals now regularly sequence patients exomes the roughly 1% of our genome that carries instructions for making proteins in search of mutations that could explain diseases.

The challenge for all health professionals is to glean robust and meaningful information from that data, says clinical geneticist Sue White from the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, who was not involved in the study.

This involves a two-step process. In the first, a patients exome or, less commonly, their whole genome is compared to a reference genome, to spot all instances where theres a difference. This list can have thousands of entries.

The second step is to sort through the list, separating potentially meaningful changes disease-causing mutations, perhaps from trivial variations that occur naturally throughout different human populations.

The new open-source program, called Mendel,MD, tackles this second step. Doctors can upload a file containing a list of the genetic variants within a persons genome. From this, Mendel,MD produces a shortlist of genes most likely to be the disease culprit by searching databases of known disease-causing mutations.

The team behind Mendel,MD tested the programs mettle on 57 cases of suspected genetic disorders in Brazilian patients. In half of these cases, the program gave a definitive diagnosis, pinpointing the responsible gene mutation. Without exome sequencing, only around 1 in 10 cases are usually diagnosed, says White.

The program also identified the responsible gene mutation for 11 out of 42 cases of epilepsy at the Childrens University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland.

Importantly, you dont need to be a computer programmer to use Mendel,MD. Clinicians, researchers and even graduate students were all able to use the online tool.

We designed the software to be simple and intuitive enough to be used directly by physicians, even those who are not proficient in bioinformatics, says Srgio Pena, a co-author on the study.

A patients data can also be readily reanalysed as new information on disease-causing genes becomes available.

As a geneticist, White sleuths through mutations every day to diagnose genetic disorders. But its becoming increasingly important for other medical specialists neurologists, immunologists, obstetricians to be able to access this information. Easy-to-use tools like Mendel,MD could go some way to achieving this, she says.

Thats not to say that anyone can search through a list of their own genetic quirks. Direct-to-consumer genetic tests still keep a tight reign on what information is released to consumers. Getting your hands on a full list of your oddities would be very difficult.

And even with a full list, making sense of it isnt easy.

Theres still a tremendous amount of skill and clinical acumen that's involved in understanding for sure that something is causing a disease, says Simon Sadedin, Head of Clinical Bioinformatics at the Victorian Clinical Genetics Services, who was also not involved in the study. Its quite a difficult thing to do.

Read the original here:
Free software tool aids doctors diagnosing rare genetic | Cosmos - Cosmos