Unused Computer Ethics material

Spring 2014

Judge denies prosecutor's email warrant

On March 7, 2014, US Magistrate Judge John Facciola denied a federal request for a warrant to access a user's Apple-account (@mac.com) email. It appears that Judge Facciola's decision is based largely on the poor and overly broad drafting of the federal request; the request can be tightened up and resubmitted.

Despite this Court’s repeated prior warnings about the use of formulaic language and overbroad requests that — if granted — would violate the Fourth Amendment, this Court is once again asked by the government to issue a facially overbroad search and seizure warrant.

The warrant request was for a specific Apple email address, and the case was about kickbacks in defense contracting.

The problem appears to be relatively mundane: Attachment B of the request asks for

a. All records pertaining to communications between Apple and any person regarding the account, including contacts with support services and records of actions taken;
b. All records or other information regarding the identification of the accounts, to include full name, physical address, telephone numbers and other identifiers, records of session times and durations, the date on which each account was created, the length of service, the types of service utilized, the Internet Protocol (IP) address used to register each account, log-in IP addresses associated with session times and dates, account status, alternative email addresses provided during registration, methods of connecting, log files, and means and [sic] of payment (including any credit or bank account number);
c. All records or other information stored by an individual using each account, including address books, contact and buddy lists, pictures, and files;
d. All records pertaining to communications between Apple and any person regarding the account, including contacts with support services and records of actions taken;

The judge points out that "nothing in Attachment B, however, explicitly requests that Apple give the government any e-mails"! All the items listed above are metadata.

But the judge then goes on to explain that the metadata list is overbroad, and also that the government must agree to destroy any irrelevant information it receives.

Despite the Court raising its concerns and urging the government to adopt a different approach, the government continues to ask for all electronically stored information in e-mail accounts, irrespective of the relevance to the investigation.

Later, the judge quotes from the Supreme Court decision in Coolidge v New Hampshire,

[T]hose searches deemed necessary should be as limited as possible. Here, the specific evil is the ‘general warrant’ abhorred by the colonists, and the problem is not that of intrusion per se, but of a general, exploratory rummaging in a person's belongings.

In other words, the judge was concerned by a lot more than just the fact that "e-mail" wasn't explicitly listed in Attachment B. The judge also cites the Warshak decision in the Fourth Circuit.

Judge Facciola's decision is at http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/apple-warrant-14mc228.pdf.


Privacy from your provider

On a (vaguely) related note, Microsoft has some pretty heavy-handed content regulations for storage in MS SkyDrive (part of Windows Live). They ban nudity (not just "pornography") and vulgarity (which would arguably include any use of profanity). If you break the rules, you may lose access to your email account (or even to your MS-Office access subscription), not just to your data. If you try to keep your bad data on your own hard drive, but accidentally sync, or even if you back up to SkyDrive, there you go.

(More at http://www.cnet.com/8301-33642_1-57496666/skydrive-content-restrictions-among-the-toughest-in-the-cloud)

From http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/code-of-conduct:

Prohibited Uses

You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, distribute or facilitate distribution of any content ... in a way that: