Interesting People mailing list archives

more on Police Blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd


From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:06:22 -0400



Begin forwarded message:

From: "Brock N. Meeks" <bmeeks () cox net>
Date: July 27, 2006 5:17:35 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Police Blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd

I'm glad that Lauren brought this up.  I'm certainly no lawyer, but I've
covered enough trials to have learned a thing or two. And it seems to me that any defense attorney could reasonable argue that any such cached images
can't be attributed to his client with any certainty.

Unless the accused says, "this laptop has never, ever been used by anyone else and has never been out of my possession," how can any court of law say with any degree of certainty that anything in a browser cache was looked at
by the owner of the laptop?!

Perhaps it was his twisted brother or his demented boss, before passing the
laptop on to him (at MSNBC, where I used to work, for example, we were
routinely given laptops that had been used by four or five others,
especially when we went on field assignments).

Under this ruling, am I now responsible for my brother's or boss's or
co-workers cache?

--Brock

On 7/27/06 4:03 PM, "David Farber" <dave () farber net> wrote:



Begin forwarded message:

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
Date: July 27, 2006 4:02:42 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Police Blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd


The decision includes a reliance on the defendant having control of
the images in the cache by having "enlarged" at least one of the
images in the cache -- they note that the defendant clicked on some
thumbnail images that were in the cache to enlarge them. Except,
that's not the way the web works ...

Dave, it's also the case that browsers may access pages through
"prefetch" behaviors without the knowledge of the user, and without
the user ever having seen the pages in question.  See my IP
discussion (from about a year ago) about this relating to Google
output results and Mozilla/Firefox browsers:

http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200506/ msg00190.html

http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200506/ msg00212.html

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren () vortex com or lauren () pfir org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
  - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, IOIC
  - International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com




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