Wednesday, October 13, 2010

US Government seeks rehearing of Maynard decision

The US Attorney’s Office has submitted to the DC Circuit Court a petition for rehearing of the GPS issue from the recent Maynard decision. I discussed that case in a previous post. In the petition, the government argues that the court’s holding on GPS surveillance is inconsistent with both existing US Supreme Court and DC Circuit jurisprudence, “raises enormous practical problems for law enforcement” and “implicitly calls into question common and important practices such as sustained visual surveillance and photographic surveillance of public places.” A copy of the petition is available here courtesy of Wired’s Threat Level blog (See also this post there on the FBI's GPS surveillance of an Arab-American for unknown reasons).

Schneier on Web Surveillance

Security specialist Bruce Schneier has published an opinion piece on CNN. The article comes in response to reports that the Obama administration is seeking to secure law enforcement access to web-based communications data through the enactment of new legislation. See also this related post on the LegaLIFT blog.