Give me a break. There was no "locked server room" - he entered an unlocked wiring closet. The computer he "installed" was a laptop he set on a shelf (near the property of a homeless man, who was using that wiring closet to store things). He then downloaded documents that it was perfectly legal for him to download - he just automated the process so that he was downloading them a heck of a lot faster than the JSTOR people were expecting.

So at most he was actually guilty of misdemeanor breaking and entering (and I'd be willing to argue that one, since the closet wasn't actually secured in any way), and maybe some civil copyright infringement if he posted the JSTOR documents for others.

6 months and a felony conviction was *way* too much for his actual offenses.

IANAL, but there have been a number of cases where federal prosecutors have decided that a TOS violation constitutes a crime under the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). I don't think anyone has yet fought this one in the courts, so it may not stand up to judicial scrutiny, but it is most definitely used as the "stick" to convince someone to accept a plea bargain.

Needless to say,*that* particular interpretation of the law isn't likely to be used against a cop unless that particular cop seriously pisses off a U.S. Attorney.

There was no "raid" - what they did was deputize the detective in charge of the records as a U.S. Marshal, and then instruct him to transfer the records in question to other U.S. Marshals.

Pretty questionable, legally (basically, they completely sidestepped state public records laws using this trick), but I'm not sure that "raid" is the correct word to describe the processes.

Hmmmm. Take that paragraph, and "s/bitcoin exchanges/stock exchanges/" and "s/online wallets/portfolios/", and it would still be entirely true. Looks like the bitcoin markets aren't all that different from the securities markets.

I hate to spoil your snark, but Islam, like Judaism, has a prohibition against eating pork. So you could argue that *not* eating bacon is a possible warning sign of terrorist potential...

Uhm, what success? AFAIK, the only "terrorist plot" in the US that the government has prevented was that one where the idiots thought that if they blew up a fuel pipe at JFK, they could get an explosion all along that pipeline. Obviously, they didn't comprehend that for an explosion to happen, you need fuel *and* oxygen...

No, bitcoin is *not* designed to be untraceable. In fact, thanks to the blockchain, it's actually a lot easier to trace than normal cash. What's hard is taking the information from the blockchain, and connecting it to a specific individual or group. So it's pretty anonymous, but once a given wallet has been associated with someone like AQ, anyone monitoring the blockchains could extract a heck of a lot of info about where their money is coming from and going to.

Personally, I'd see it as a business opportunity. Since the percentage of time the attendant will be spending connecting/disconnecting cables will probably be quite low, why not have him/her doing something else?

"Hello, welcome to Sonic. Would you like to try our ElectroBurger and Fires combo, while we charge up your car?"

Doesn't matter what it is - if Noscript is blocking scripts, then it doesn't play (I had to allow scripts on this site before I realized what people were talking about).

The fuss isn't over the employee's email being read. It's about the email of a blogger who is *not* associated with MS (other than using a Hotmail account) being read.

What, you mean that someone who pays his ISP for a connection to the Internet shouldn't have to pay extra if he actually wants to use that bandwidth? I'm pretty sure that'd be classified as communism, or terrorism, or whatever the 'ism of the month is.

ISPs will fight tooth and nail to keep from becoming the "dumb pipes" that true net neutrality would make them. Because then they wouldn't be able to siphon off the profits of companies that have actually innovated themselves a business in the Internet space, rather than just continuing to make a buck off of their infrastructure semi-monopolies.

How about "it keeps you from being hauled off to jail by some really mean feds because someone used your wireless to download kiddie porn"? *That* most people can easily understand.

Only if you don't consider externalities. If the person hasn't been successfully rehabilitated, then your cost savings would be eaten up by the increased cost of the new crimes committed once released from prison.

And the simple truth is that we don't know how to effectively rehabilitate many criminals. The most effective rehab processes (such as those used by Sweden) still have a 35% recidivsm rate.

Because trademarks don't work that way. In the US, you either have to already be using the mark as a part of your business, or have a genuine intent to use that mark in the near future (for the second case, you may be required to present a business plan showing how you are going to use the mark in order to prove your intent is genuine).

The reality is that Fluke has been using the "dark face with yellow edges on a digital multimeter" for as long as there have been digital multimeters. Anyone who uses multimeters regularly would likely be able to identify a Fluke by it's color scheme. Which is exactly what trademarks are intended to protect.

Here's the explanation. There was no Grand Consipracy to prevent scientists from obtaining and studying the seeds. What wasn't allowed was for scientists to have access to the fields where the plants were being commercially grown.

They *could* have obtained the seeds, planted them, and done their studies on those crops. But they couldn't possibly reproduce the sheer scale of Mega-agrobusiness. Since evolution involves lots of random chance, there would be a lot more chances for resistance to develop in the millions of acres of commercial fields than there would be in the much smaller scale fields available to researchers.

About the onlly thing to be alarmed about is the fact that the EPA didn't require monitoring of GMO-planted fields for such changes. But while that might be alarming, it's not particularly surprising, given the way the US goverment caters to corporations.

And how would you count the strikes? That would require some sort of central records of warrant applications, each one indexed by something. Using a suspect's name wouldn't be reliable (warrants listing "john Doe" are issued all the time, when law enforcement is trying to get evidence needed to identify a suspect). And you wouldn't be able to rely on a "case ID", since law enforcement would be the one issuing said ID, and could just "open a new case" when they ran out of strikes.

Now add in the possibility of different jurisdictions - a warrant for someone's email could be sought in the jurisdiction in which the person lives, the jurisdiction where the email provider's headquarters are located, the jurisdiction where the servers are located, etc.

And of course if we could rely on prosecutors to police themselves on the matter, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion...

What else is he supposed to do in this case? There is nothing like a "double jeopardy" rule that applies to warrant applications, so the government's attorneys have and always will have the ability to keep doing it over until they get something that the judge finds acceptable.