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The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled a narcotics officer didn't violate Fourth Amendment search and seizure rules when he opened a package containing cocaine and methamphetamine at an airport.

The St. Cloud Times reports (http://on.sctimes.com/Yz3Ggd) the court upheld a county court decision Wednesday that the removal of the package from a conveyor belt wasn't a seizure and sniffing by a police dog wasn't a search in the 2011 incident.

Twenty-three-year-old Corey Eichers of Avon later received the package and was convicted of first-degree controlled substance crime. He was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison.

Eichers argued in the lawsuit that the officer didn't have authority to remove and open the package at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

It was sent via UPS air mail and a police dog indicated it contained drugs.

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Minnesota Supreme Court upholds airport drug case decision

SAN MATEO COUNTY, Calif.

The family of a mentally ill woman filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against San Mateo County Sheriffs Office Tuesday after a deputy shot and killed the 18-year-old last June. The suit alleges that the deputy violated Fourth Amendment limits on police authority.

In late August, San Mateo County Yanira Serrano-Garcia's mother broke down as she announced the suit.

With her attorney acting as translator Carmen Serrano-Garcia said, They not only killed Yanira they killed the entire family and the goal is to prevent any other family from suffering this kind of pain."

Serrano-Garcia battled mental illness and on June 3rd her brother, Tony Serrano, called 911 because she refused to take her medication and was fighting with their parents.

In addition to filing suit the family released 911 recordings from the incident. Tony Serrano asked for medical help.

"This is not really an emergency. I'm calling because my sister she has the schizophrenia, he can be heard saying in the 911 recording.

According to the familys attorney Yanira was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 15 years old.

"The Sheriff's Department was aware of that, they had visited her on three prior occasions without incident, said Arnoldo Casillas, family attorney.

In the time it took Deputy Menh Trieu to reach the San Mateo County home, the family says Yanira had taken her medicine and was in the house.

Read this article:
Family of a mentally ill woman files lawsuit against San Mateo Co. after deadly shooting

Last month, Ross Ulbrichtthe alleged Silk Road mastermind who is facing trial in November for multiple drug and ID fraud chargesfiled a motion arguing that his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated in the governments seizure of the Silk Road servers and subsequent searches. In response, the prosecution has revealed for the first time how the government was able to uncover and seize the servers of the online drug bazaar.

Ever since the servers were seized in October 2013, the take down of the Silk Road remained a shadowy government secret. Now, the feds have shed some light on their actions in a 59-page rebuttal and 10-page letter letter from former FBI agent Christopher Tarbell filed on Friday.

According to the rebuttal, the downfall of the Silk Road was as simple as some leaky code. The server was located by the FBI New York Field Office in June 2013, when FBI agents noticed the servers Internet protocol (IP) address leaking in traffic sent from the Silk Road website when FBI agents interacted with it. After examining the leaking IP addresses, the FBI says it found IP addresses that were not associated with the Tor network. When those IP addresses were entered into a non-Tor web browser, a partial Silk Road login screen appeared, which the FBI saw as confirmation that the IP addressed belonged to the Silk Road server.

The FBIs next step was to contact authorities in Iceland, where the servers were located and ask for routing information and images of the server contents. The Reykjavik Metropolitan Police sent the FBI routing information, which revealed a high volume of Tor traffic flowing to the server. The RMP then sent the FBI server images containing databases of vendor postings, transaction records, private messages between users, and other data reflecting user activity, which confirmed that the servers were hosting the Silk Road. Additionally, computer code from the servers in Iceland led the feds to a Silk Road server backup at a data center in Pennsylvania. After obtaining warrants, the FBI searched those databases twice before seizing the servers in October.

In the scenario described by the FBI, the takedown of the Silk Road happened not because of a Tor software failure but because of a failure to properly secure the website, according to Forbes contributor and Tor expert Runa Sandvik. To have a secure Tor service, one needs to ensure that the code is secure, that the web server only accepts connections from Tor, and that the server does not reveal its real IP address. The vulnerability through which the FBI says it discovered the servers is surprisingly simple. Sandvik says shes surprised that the FBI would be the first to discover a vulnerability that simple when there were Silk Road users hunting for bugs daily on the website.

Beyond satisfying curiosity, the way the Silk Road servers were seized has important implications for evidence in Ulbrichts case. According to the fruit of a poisonous tree argument presented by Ulbrichts attorney Joshua Dratel in the July motion, if the original searches violated Ulbrichts rights, then all evidence stemming from those searches should be suppressed.

The rebuttal makes the claim that all FBI searches were legal and not violations of Ulbrichts rights. In short, notwithstanding the lengthy exposition of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in Ulbrichts briefmost of which has nothing to do with this casehis various claims are bereft of any support of the law, the rebuttal reads. Because the servers were located overseas, the FBI says it didnt need a warrant to ask foreign authorities to search the serves, and the rest of the 59-page rebuttal argues for the legality of the rest of the searches leading up to Ulbrichts arrest.

Presented with both the defenses motion and the prosecutions rebuttal, the courts will make a decision about whether to uphold or deny the motion to suppress evidence because of a Fourth Amendment rights violation. In July, Judge Katherine Forrest denied Ulbrichts first motion to dismiss charges. That motion asked if Ulbricht could be charged with money laundering when Bitcoin isnt recognized as currency, and if he could be charged with drug trafficking for simply running the Silk Road website.

Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his trial is scheduled to begin on November 3, 2014.

Check out the rest of the Forbes Silk Road coverage here.

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The Feds Explain How They Seized The Silk Road Servers

The U.S. Department of Justice is current prosecuting Ross Ulbricht for being the apparent mastermind of the illegal narcotics website Silk Road, which was run for years on a hidden website. In defending the prosecution, the U.S. Attorneys Office recently filed a very interesting brief explaining how investigators found the computer server that was hosting the Silk Road (SR) server. Although the brief is about the Fourth Amendment, it has very interesting implications for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal computer hacking statute.

The brief explains how the FBI found the SR server:

The Internet protocol (IP) address of the SR Server (the Subject IP Address) was leaking from the site due to an apparent misconfiguration of the user login interface by the site administrator i.e., Ulbricht. FBI agents noticed the leak upon reviewing the data sent back by the Silk Road website when they logged on or attempted to log on as users of the site. A close examination of the headers in this data revealed a certain IP address not associated with the Tor network (the Subject IP Address as the source of some of the data). FBI personnel entered the Subject IP Address directly into an ordinary (non-Tor) web browser, and it brought up a screen associated with the Silk Road login interface, confirming that the IP address belonged to the SR Server.

The FBIs declaration explains that the investigating agent entered miscellaneous information into the login prompt of the Silk Road server and received an error message. A forensic analysis of the error message found that it contained an IP address not associated with Tor. That IP address was the address of the Silk Road server.

The DOJ brief argues that there was nothing unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful about obtaining the inadvertently leaked IP address from the Silk Road server:

There was nothing unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful in the FBIs detection of that leak. The Silk Road website, including its user login interface, was fully accessible to the public, and the FBI was entitled to access it as well. See United States v. Meregildo, 883 F. Supp. 2d 523, 525 (S.D.N.Y. 2012) (noting that web content accessible to the public is not protected by the Fourth Amendment and can be viewed by law enforcement agents without a warrant). The FBI was equally entitled to review the headers of the communications the Silk Road website sent back when the FBI interacted with the user login interface, which is how the Subject IP Address was found.

It does not matter that Ulbricht intended to conceal the IP address of the SR Server from public view. He failed to do so competently, and as a result the IP address was transmitted to another party which turned out to be the FBI who could lawfully take notice of it. See United States v. Borowy, 595 F.3d 1045, 1048 (9th Cir. 2010) (finding that defendant had no legitimate privacy interest in child pornography files posted on peer-sharing website, notwithstanding that defendant had made ineffectual effort to use site feature that would have prevented his files from being shared); United States v. Post , __ F. Supp. 2d __, 2014 WL 345992, at *2-*3 (S.D. Tex. Jan. 30, 2014) (finding that defendant had no legitimate privacy interest in metadata used to identify him that was embedded in file he had posted on Tor website, notwithstanding that he did not realize he was releasing that information and he intended to remain anonymous).

In short, the FBIs location of the SR Server was lawful, and nothing about the way it was accomplished taints any evidence subsequently recovered in the Governments investigation.

I wonder: Does DOJs position that there is nothing . . . unlawful about this procedure mean that DOJ concedes that it would not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030, the federal computer hacking statute?

The FBIs location of the SR server brings to mind the prosecution of my former client Andrew Auernheimer, aka weev, who readers may recall was criminally prosecuted for his role in visiting website addresses on an AT&T server that AT&T had thought and hoped would not be found by the public. Auernheimers co-conspirator found that AT&T had posted e-mail addresses on its server at IP addresses that the public was not expected to find.

See the original post here:
Volokh Conspiracy: Does obtaining leaked data from a misconfigured website violate the CFAA?

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Lawyers for a San Francisco man charged with operating an online marketplace for illegal drugs are asking a judge to toss out most of the evidence against him, saying the Fourth Amendment protects their client from "indiscriminate rummaging" through his entire online history.

The lawyers, Joshua Dratel and Lindsay Lewis, said in court papers that the government violated the ban on illegal search and seizure when it scoured the computers, servers and websites 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht used.

They said applications for search warrants described an investigation that began in early 2013 with a server hosting the Silk Road website in a foreign country.

"The wholesale collection and study of Mr. Ulbricht's entire digital history without limitation expressly sought in the warrants and granted represent the very type of indiscriminate rummaging that caused the American colonists so much consternation," according to the papers filed late Friday in federal court in Manhattan.

Ulbricht has pleaded not guilty to charges of narcotics trafficking, computer hacking, running a continuing criminal enterprise and money laundering. His trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 3.

Prosecutors say Ulbricht went by the online handle the Dread Pirate Roberts, an apparent reference to a character in the movie "The Princess Bride," and turned the underground site into a place where anonymous users could buy or sell contraband and illegal services.

Authorities say Silk Road, which had nearly 1 million registered users by July 2013, generated more than $1 billion in illicit business from January 2011 through September. Federal investigators say Silk Road users anonymously browsed through nearly 13,000 listings under such categories as cannabis, psychedelics and stimulants.

The website used Bitcoin, the tough-to-track digital currency, before it was shut down.

Ulbricht was arrested last year at a public library in San Francisco, where he lived. Authorities said he was chatting online at the time with a co-operating witness. He remains incarcerated without bail.

A prosecutor's spokeswoman declined to comment Monday.

Original post:
Defence asks judge in NYC to toss out bulk of evidence in Silk Road case as illegally obtained