Time Sensitive Action Required by 6.21.16: Big Brotherland the New American Homeland?
With Rule 41, Little-Known Committee Proposes to Grant New Hacking Powers to the Government
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed legal action against Google trying to protect your child’s data mined from school and now it’s time to support EFF in its effort to stop the updates to Rule 41. From eff.com:
The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It’s not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It’s a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December.
The proposal comes from the advisory committee on criminal rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States. The amendment [PDF] would update Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, creating a sweeping expansion of law enforcement’s ability to engage in hacking and surveillance. The Supreme Court just passed the proposal to Congress, which has until December 1 to disavow the change or it becomes the rule governing every federal court across the country. This is part of a statutory process through which federal courts may create new procedural rules, after giving public notice and allowing time for comment, under a “rules enabling act.”1
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure set the ground rules for federal criminal prosecutions. The rules cover everything from correcting clerical errors in a judgment to which holidays a court will be closed on—all the day-to-day procedural details that come with running a judicial system.
The key word here is “procedural.” By law, the rules and proposals are supposed to be procedural and must not change substantive rights.
But the amendment to Rule 41 isn’t procedural at all. It creates new avenues for government hacking that were never approved by Congress.
The proposal would grant a judge the ability to issue a warrant to remotely access, search, seize, or copy data when “the district where the media or information is located has been concealed through technological means” or when the media are on protected computers that have been “damaged without authorization and are located in five or more districts.” It would grant this authority to any judge in any district where Time Sensitive Action Required by 6.21.16: Big Brotherland the New American Homeland? – Missouri Education Watchdog: