constitution

A federal judge today dismissed a criminal case against a man accused of stalking a religious leader on Twitter, ruling that the "uncomfortable" speech included in his tweets were protected by the Constitution.

William Lawrence Cassidy was accused of using the microblogging site to harass and cause "substantial emotional distress" to a religious figure identified in court papers only by the initials "A.Z." Some of the more than 8,000 tweets Cassidy sent included predictions of A.Z.'s violent death.

"Although in bad taste, Mr. Cassidy's Tweets and Blog posts … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

There was good news yesterday for Internet intermediaries and other cloud-computing service providers. In a highly readable decision (PDF) from Judge Danny Boggs of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court held that key provisions of the Stored Communications Act are unconstitutional. The case is U.S. v. Warshak.

Under SCA, law enforcement agents can compel Internet service providers to disclose the contents of private communications they hold on behalf of users. Such communications include, of course, personal and business e-mail, along with other documents, photos, and … Read more

When a census worker visited Oliver Sarle's home in Warwick, R.I., the crusty farmer refused to answer a series of questions, including how much revenue his crops had generated the previous year and how many gallons of milk his cows had produced.

Sarle was charged with a misdemeanor: not answering questions posed by an official representative of the census. A Rhode Island judge sided with the government, ruling that the "information required by the statute to be collected must be assumed to be important and necessary for the public service."

The year was 1890, but the … Read more

The good folks at Cloudiquity.com pointed me to a couple of Threat Level articles from last week that highlight yet another example of how public policy and the law are often at odds with running a business in the cloud.

The articles report that the FBI raided at least two Texas data centers last week, serving search-and-seizure warrants for computing equipment, including servers, routers and storage. The FBI was seeking equipment that may have been involved in fraudulent business practices by a handful of small VoIP vendors.

The problem is that they didn't just grab the systems belonging to the VoIP vendors, but also hundreds of servers that served a wide variety of businesses, the vast majority of which had never dealt with or even heard of the companies under investigation, according to Threat Level. Companies interviewed complained of losing millions of dollars in lost revenue and equipment with no warning whatsoever.

One company, auto vendor marketing and inventory management vendor Liquid Motors, filed suit in a U.S. district court seeking a restraining order against the FBI that would force the return of the company's servers.

In what has to be one of the most scary verdicts for cloud users everywhere, the district court sided with the FBI and supported its probable-cause argument for holding on to the servers. Although the FBI was kind enough to copy the disk drives for Liquid Motors (on drives Liquid Motors had to provide), the precedent set here sends a shiver down my spine.

The issue, I think, is one of how search and seizure laws are being interpreted for assets hosted in third-party facilities. If the court upholds that servers can be seized despite no direct warrants being served on the owners of those servers (or the owners of the software and data housed on those servers), then imagine what that means for hosting your business in a cloud shared by thousands or millions of other users.

As I noted in a blog post last fall, there are a series of legal issues that really need to be addressed before external cloud services can truly be trusted. Here is what I argue must happen:… Read more

The video game industry and free-speech proponents landed yet another legal victory on Monday, when a federal appeals court affirmed a 2006 rejection of a Minnesota law restricting minors' access to violent titles.

The Minnesota law would have imposed up to a $25 fine on minors younger than 17 caught buying or renting video games rated "M" for mature or "AO" for adults-only, under the video game industry's rating system.

But a U.S. district judge blocked the new policy the day before it was scheduled to take effect. The judge cited constitutional concerns and &… Read more