Appeals Court Says Feds Need Warrants to Search E-Mail
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U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down the Stored Communications Act as unconstitutional, protecting e-mail for the first time in 20 years.
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CINCINNATI, Oct. 4 -- The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday.
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Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without showing probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
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Attorney Eric J. Sinrod examines the case of an employee who says he was dismissed because of an online search into his work history.
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Authorities investigating the disappearance of a former suburban Chicago police officer's wife have obtained a warrant seeking information to identify who sent a racy text message to her cell phone.
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(09/30/04)-- A federal judge in New York has struck down a law that authorizes the government to make secret searches of telephone and Internet records.
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The Federal Trade Commission has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.
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By Dan Sewell  Federal investigators overstepped constitutional bounds by searching e-mails without a warrant during the fraud investigation of the head of an herbal supplement company known for its "Smiling Bob" ads, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.  The ruling by the 6th U.S.
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By HOPE YEN  WASHINGTON - The Bush administration asked an appeals court Thursday to step in immediately and dismiss a lawsuit over the government's warrantless eavesdropping program, calling a lower judge's ruling dangerous and wrong.  The Justice Department asked the 9th U.S.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.
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WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has made a series of arrests against purveyors of e-mail "spam" as part of a nationwide crackdown against Internet scam artists, a marketing group said Wednesday.    The Direct Marketing Association, which has put up $500,000 to help the FBI and Justice Department with the probe, said in a statement that the arrests stem from a yearlong investigation intended to "engender greater trust and comfort in legitimate e-mail communications."   Details of "Operation Slam Spam" were expected to be announced Thursday, according to the marketing group and a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity...
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The government can continue to use its warrantless domestic wiretap program pending the Justice Department's appeal of a federal judge's ruling outlawing the program, an Appeals Court in Cincinnati ruled on Wednesday.
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Civil liberties groups join the Department of Justice to protest a ruling that said ISPs can freely monitor e-mail. By Ryan Singel.
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Said the accused violated the &quot;CAN-SPAM&quot; federal law requiring e-mail containing sexually explicit images to be clearly identified.
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Two provisions of the Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge rules Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam. Last May the Aurora, Colorado, law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something. What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide. On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: the Barracuda Networks Inc. appliance began blocking e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit. Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter. What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms. "This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, chief technology officer with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false positives in the anti-spam world to misidentify a crucial piece of correspondence." Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner said. Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. This charge has been led by the federal court system, which uses an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF), in nearly 200 courts across the country. All federal bankruptcy and district courts use CM/ECF and soon it will be standard in the appellate courts, according to Richard Carelli, a spokesman with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said. Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail. In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received." The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue. But despite the persistence of spammers, Balasubramani doesn't think that the CM/ECF system is really in any trouble. "I don't think the scourge of spam is going to hurt the viability of CM/ECF," he said. "I see this decision as a little bit of an aberration." Kesner, who was a lawyer before taking over the CTO job at Fenwick & West , points out that missed appointments happen when parties are notified by postal mail as well. He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue. His advice for legal IT staff? "You test like crazy," he said. "And then you pray and genuflect."
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The Bush administration appealed a court decision Monday that allowed a lawsuit to go forward challenging the president's warrantless domestic spying program.