My annual top 25 MLB players under age 25 ranking went up this week for Insiders, and please read the intro while you’re there. I also wrote a non-Insider All-Star roster reaction piece, covering five glaring snubs and five guys who made it but shouldn’t have. I also held my usual Klawchat on Thursday.
My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the reissue of the Reiner Knizia game Ra.
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And now, the links…
- U.S. Senior District Judge Henry Coke Morgan ruled this week that the federal government did not require a warrant to hack into a computer to get its IP address. I’m linking to that news story, which takes a broader view of the ruling than I got from reading it (note: I’m not a lawyer), because I’m soliciting your opinions. While I don’t like the ruling, I don’t think this just some idiot judge failing to understand the technology. The ruling instead says that a user has no reasonable expectation of privacy around his/her IP address (fair), and therefore the government did not need a warrant to do what it did here (unfair?).
- Alberta prosecutors are appealing for a longer sentence against the anti-vaxxer parents who let their kid die of meningitis. The father in particular has dug in, failing to comply with a judge’s order to post the ruling on their “prayers for Ezekiel” page.
- A study of 481 pitchers aged 9 to 14 found that pitching more than 100 innings in a year increased injury likelihood by 350%. The same study found no correlation between curveball usage and injury, and a statistically insignificant correlation between playing catcher and suffering injury.
- Remember my post on how Suki Kim’s work of investigative journalism inside North Korea was tabbed a “memoir” over her objections? Well, the NY Times reviewed Hisham Matar’s latest book and wrote “It seems unfair to call Hisham Matar’s extraordinary new book a memoir, since it is so many other things besides.”
- I tweeted about how people use the passive voice to avoid responsibility, at which point a reader sent this 2014 Washington Post story on exactly that topic in discussing police shootings.
- The indie-rock band WAVVES, who appear quite frequently on my music playlists here, made … uh, waves this week when bandleader Nathan Williams banned racists, homophobes, rape apologists, and Trump supporters from their concerts.
- A Jewish writer who works for Donald Trump’s son-in-law at The Observer wrote this open letter on the candidate’s anti-Semitic comments to her boss.
- Macy’s apparently has a history of illegally detaining and extorting suspected shoplifters. This seems like something from a Philip K. Dick novel.
- Some state agencies won’t forgive student loans even if the borrower dies. Our student loan industry is a giant disaster anyway, and it isn’t doing anything to make college more affordable. I’d love to see Sallie Mae and other analogous institutions shut down entirely, at which point colleges won’t be able to hike tuition indiscriminately any more.
- You can be biased but still be right. Maybe I should send this to every whining fan accusing me of bias for or against every team.
- Can organic farms be run on large spaces like so-called Big Ag? The regulatory answer is yes, but the practices of these farms probably don’t match what you think of as “organic.” I’ve been listening to the audio version of Blue Hill executive chef Dan Barber’s new book The Third Plate, and it’s quite clear that “organic” as a food label is quickly losing its meaning.
- A longread from Foreign Policy about the murder of an American woman in Nepal touches on both the legally shady industry of couchsurfing (and similar businesses) and the possibility that an innocent man was tortured into a confession.
- Tweet of the week:
Tell me again how the US improved their water and sanitation in 1995. #vaccines #vaccineswork pic.twitter.com/0CPeI0gnFv
— Doc Bastard (@DocBastard) July 8, 2016
Keith,
I don’t think your Suki Kim comment is totally accurate. I heard her interviewed on NPR and she stated that she consented to her publisher’s request to market it as a memoir. Granted, she had initial misgivings about that and subsequently wished she hadn’t consented, the fact is that she did, and likely gained more sales and attention because of it.
It is accurate, based on her own article about it from the New Republic.
Keith,
I am a lawyer (40 years as a trial lawyer and 4th Amendment instructor), and once the judge determined there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in the IP address, then by definition there was no 4th Amendment search, which requires government intrusion into a reasonable expectation of privacy. No 4th Amendment search means no need for a warrant.
Due respect Keith, the linked article says verbatim what I wrote.
“It soon became clear that this was a battle I could not win, and I relented. The content of my work was what really mattered, I told myself. However it was labeled and marketed, my reporting would speak for itself.”
I said “over her objections.” Which is true. I don’t see your point.
Also an attorney, and Jim is right, of course. But I thought it sort of odd that the judge reached the IP address privacy issue when the warrant was validly issued, which didn’t seem like a particularly close question.
Ruling that a warrant is not needed to search something to which the person has no reasonable expectation of privacy has been the legal standard for a long time. For example, if police see a marijuana plant in your back seat when they pull you over, they don’t need a warrant to search your vehicle. So if a person indeed does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP address (and I can’t say I agree with the judge in that regard), the prevailing legal standard would not require a warrant.
So first, thank you all for the insight on this, because I actually read large chunks of the judge’s ruling but was not confident I summarized this part well at all.
Second, what do you think of that part of the ruling? What would constitute a reasonable expectation of privacy in the IP address itself? As much as I want us to have more privacy rights online, my gut (non-legal) reaction to this was that connecting to the Internet is, or could be, construed as a tacit agreement for this address to be publicly accessible. It sounds like the defendant in this case took steps to cloak his IP address, but is that the same as expecting privacy in a legal sense? All I have on this is my personal feelings, but I really know nothing about the law here.
There should be a reasonable expectation of privacy with an IP address. That’s the real issue.
Isn’t a homophone automatically a racist?
One question I have regarding the IP address ruling is: At what point would a person have the expectation of privacy with respect to their IP address? There are many tools available, VPNs, TOR, address spoofing, etc., which to some degree hide the IP address of the user. If, for example, I were using a VPN in Singapore, thereby presenting an IP address in Singapore to your site, would I have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding my IP address?
Is that analogous to using an unlisted phone number and using call blocking to stop caller ID? You’d have a reasonable expectation that another citizen wouldn’t be able to obtain your number, but does that give you a reasonable expectation of legal privacy – that law enforcement couldn’t get your IP address? Would they have to get a warrant in that case?
I read the ruling and I think the Independent grossly mischaracterized its ruling.
Lets say we have Computer A and Computer B. Computer A is hosting blatantly illegal content (like child pornography) and Computer B is downloading the content from Computer A. The government gets a valid warrant to search Computer A. In the process, it inserts code on to Computer A to reveal the IP addresses that are accessing the illegal content. Based on that code and what it reveals, it gets a warrant to search Computer B.
That is the basic gist of what happened in this case. Both of the computers (the child porn host and the one used by the defendant) were searched based on a warrant issued by a federal magistrate judge. The fact that the defendant has a subjective desire to maintain the privacy of his IP address is immaterial; in order to use the internet, your computer has to reveal its true IP address to *someone* There can be no objective expectation of privacy in the IP address under those circumstances.
The Independent’s story mischaracterizes the ruling by using the word “hack.” The difference between hacking and noting IP addresses is the difference between a wiretap and the government knowing your phone number.