police

A 15-year-old juvenile delinquent can't be completely prohibited from using Facebook, Twitter, or other social-media sites, a California state appeals court says.

The San Diego court ruled that a teenage boy who molested a toddler and grabbed and detained a teenage girl has a First Amendment right to use social media and chat rooms -- in part, the justices said, because his offenses didn't involve the Internet.

Those restrictions "are not tailored to Andre's convictions for violating another's personal liberty, willfully annoying and molesting another, unlawful use of force, and lewd and lascivious conduct, or … Read more

Police are allowed in some circumstances to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant, a federal judge said yesterday.

CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission -- and without a warrant -- to install multiple "covert digital surveillance cameras" in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana plants were being grown.

This is the latest case to highlight how advances in technology are causing the legal system to rethink how Americans' privacy … Read more

The law and Facebook have one thing in common: they are both repositories of large emotions.

Sometimes, though, they don't always work in tandem.

Word reaches me from Texas of a troubled happening after a court case in Mesquite. (The inhabitants are not called Mesquitos. Or are they?)

As CBS Houston tells it, the local police are up in arms after 30-year-old Melissa Welthall allegedly posted and spread photos of an undercover cop on Facebook.

Why would someone do that? This is a question so often asked before receiving a bafflingly human answer.

In this case, police say that … Read more

A Pennsylvania prison inmate is waging a novel legal battle -- for a supposed First Amendment right to Facebook.

Mark Nixon, who is incarcerated in Frackville, Pa., filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after he was denied access to printouts of Facebook pages sent through the U.S. mail, which prison officials labeled "unacceptable correspondence" and discarded.

A federal appeals court rejected his lawsuit on Friday, ruling that Nixon had not demonstrated that his First Amendment rights -- which are limited during his incarceration -- have been violated.

"Inmates' right to receive and send mail can be … Read more

Anti-government rants on Facebook can land you in a heap of trouble.

A federal judge has given the green light to the U.S. Justice Department's prosecution of an Indiana man who allegedly posted incendiary remarks about police.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Lawrence in Indiana rejected requests by the defendant, Matthew Michael, to throw out the charges on the grounds that no specific Drug Enforcement Administration agent or other individual had actually been named in the posts.

Lawrence ruled that -- assuming the Facebook postings were illegal threats, which has yet to be proved -- they &… Read more

Swedish police raided Web host PRQ earlier this week but it wasn't clear what they were after. Now, the ISP's owner is saying that the authorities seized servers for Web sites that allegedly dealt in illegal file-sharing.

According to TorrentFreak, police took three servers -- one belonged to one of Sweden's popular torrent sites called Tankafetast, another to an alleged Android app piracy site called Appbucket. It's unclear what was on the third server.

On Monday, the authorities targeted PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet. Former … Read more

Seattle residents now have the option of following the local police department on Twitter. In a first-of-a-kind program, the city's authorities are launching a new initiative that involves cops translating the news they get on the streets to tweets.

Dubbed "Tweets-by-beat," this program attempts to replace the police blotter that normally runs in local papers with a tech version of basically the same thing, according to the New York Times. When residents follow the department on the social network, they'll get routine tweets of the up-to-the-moment crime happenings in their neighborhoods.

"Liquor violation -- intoxicated … Read more

You've double-parked your car to pick something up when a robot rolls up and threatens to give you a ticket. You might laugh, but the thing's talking with a human voice.

Researchers at Florida International University's Discovery Lab are working with a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves to build telepresence robots that could patrol while being controlled by disabled police officers and military vets. In a sense, they would be hybrid man-machine cops, like RoboCop. … Read more

The Big Apple is seeing a surge in stolen Apple devices.

The latest data from the New York City Police Department shows that iPhone and iPad thefts have soared 40 percent this year so far, compared with the same period last year.

Between January 1 and September 23 of this year, a total of 11,447 cases of stolen iDevices were reported to the New York City police, a rise of 3,280 over 2011, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said in a report sent to CNET.

"As if to mirror the market place, thefts of Apple products increased this … Read more