Free Republic

The campaign against Rule 41 – which will give cops and Feds in America the power to hack people's computers around the world – has kicked up a gear. Leaders of the US House of Representatives and Senate got a letter today urging them to block the rule change before it becomes permanent in December. The proposed legislative tweak, quietly passed by an obscure committee and approved by the Supreme Court in April, would allow a US magistrate judge to grant law enforcement access to any stored data on a computer, phone, or any storage device around the world that...

The Justice Department is seeking an amendment proposal that will give the federal government express power to locate and hack into the computers of anyone suspected of criminal activity. However, many organizations, including Google and the American Civil Liberties Union, are concerned that the broad language of the proposal leaves potential for Fourth Amendment violations.Federal Prosecutors claim that this revision to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure  has become necessary now that crime can be committed and concealed on the internet under a veil of anonymity and masked location. But in a memo responding to the concerns civil libertarians have...

Getty - TORSTEN SILZ / Staff Global tech giant Google submitted public court comments this week calling the FBI’s new plan for obtaining digital search warrants a “serious and complex” constitutional concern.Google’s comments are warning of a new Justice Department program that would allow judges more flexibility in approval of search warrants for electronic data.The company’s director of law enforcement and information security says that the plan to alter an existing provision, known as Rule 41: “…raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide.” According to National Journal, Rule 41 of criminal procedure, “permits judges to grant search...