Nota Bene

Yahoo! Tech reports:

Miffed that, if you return home from travel overseas, U.S. Customs can decide to search, and even seize, all the files on your computer, your camera, and even your cell phone? So is Senator Russ Feingold, who opened Congressional hearings on the matter last week with a scathing indictment on the practice.

In Feingold’s published opening remarks *** he begins by saying that most Americans are probably not even aware that the practice is now commonplace here. In fact, it’s been going on for at least two years; a full seven percent of business travelers now report having electronic equipment seized at the border.

The New York Times has more here.

Fox Business News reports:

New torture claims have been leveled at two U.S. military contractors by a former Abu Ghraib “ghost” detainee who was wrongly imprisoned and later released without charge, according to a lawsuit filed today in Los Angeles federal court by his U.S. legal team.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Emad Al-Janabi, a 43-year-old Iraqi blacksmith, who alleges that he was beaten and forced from his home by people in U.S. military uniforms and civilian clothing in September 2003. He was released from Abu Ghraib without charge in July 2004.

The AP reports:

The Supreme Court dealt a setback Tuesday to civil rights and privacy advocates who oppose the Bush administrations warrantless wiretapping program. The justices, without comment, turned down an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to let it pursue a lawsuit against the program that began shortly after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.The action underscored the difficulty of mounting a challenge to the eavesdropping, which remains classified and was confirmed by President Bush only after a newspaper article revealed its existence.

“Its very disturbing that the presidents actions will go unremarked upon by the court,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLUs national security project. “In our view, it shouldnt be left to executive branch officials alone to determine the limits.”

The Terrorist Surveillance Program no longer exists, although the administration has maintained it was legal.

PC World reports:

Two civil liberties groups have filed a lawsuit in a federal court in California in response to complaints from travelers of excessive screenings at border-entry points, including inspections of the data on laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In the legal filing, the two groups ask the court to order the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division to release records relating to its policies and procedures on the “questioning, search and inspection” of travelers entering or returning to the U.S. at various ports of entry.

The ALC and the EFF, which are both based in San Francisco, said in a joint statement that they filed the suit under the Freedom of Information Act after the DHS didn’t respond to a FOIA request the two groups submitted last October. They added that they had requested the information from the DHS in response to increasing allegations of “excessive or repeated” screenings by CBP agents.

For instance, the ALC received more than 20 complaints over the past year from individuals who said they had been “grilled about their families, religious practices, volunteer activities, political beliefs, or associations” when returning to the U.S. from trips overseas, according to the statement.

Some of the people also claimed that CBP staffers inspected and sometimes copied the contents of their laptop files and cell phone directories without providing any reason for doing so, the ALC and the EFF said. The groups are seeking the information about the screening policies so they can assess whether they should take any legal or legislative actions to try to force the CBP to change its procedures.

DHS officials referred an inquiry seeking comment about the lawsuit and the earlier FOIA request to the CBP’s press office, which didn’t immediately return a phone call placed late in the afternoon Eastern time.

The Washington Post reports:

Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.

In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.

BetaNews.com reports:

Bringing his claims to Capitol Hill for the first time, former AT&T network technician Mark Klein appeared yesterday at a press conference to reiterate his astonishing claim: AT&T operated a 24 x 48-foot room in one of its network operations centers in San Francisco, where Klein discovered his employer was cooperating with the National Security Agency in the monitoring of all Internet traffic over a major backbone line.

“I have first-hand knowledge of the clandestine collaboration between one giant telecommunications company, AT&T, and the National Security Agency to facilitate the most comprehensive illegal domestic spying program in history,” Klein remarked in his press conference yesterday.

Klein’s allegations have been part of an ongoing class-action suit against AT&T since January 2006, funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While he was not able to witness everyday goings-on in the “Secure Room,” as an engineer, Klein was privy to how the room was wired. In a June 8 sworn deposition entered into evidence in this case, he described what he saw.

The NY Times reports:

A federal judge yesterday struck down the parts of the recently revised USA Patriot Act that authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use informal secret demands called national security letters to compel companies to provide customer records.

The law allowed the F.B.I. not only to force communications companies, including telephone and Internet providers, to turn over the records without court authorization, but also to forbid the companies to tell the customers or anyone else what they had done. Under the law, enacted last year, the ability of the courts to review challenges to the ban on disclosures was quite limited.

You can read the entire text of the decision here.

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Citing concerns about terrorism, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that airline passengers lose their right to object to a search after they go through initial security screenings.

The San Francisco-based court, ruling in a case involving a Hawaii man, said airline passengers couldn’t refuse searches once they place their belongings on an X-ray tray or walk through a metal detector.

It was the appeals court’s second decision in the case of Daniel Kuualoha Aukai because it wanted to clarify an earlier decision on the issue of consent. Last year, the court ruled Aukai couldn’t back out of additional searches even after he no longer wanted to board a flight.

You can read the opinion in United States v. Aukai here.

The Washington Post reports:

The Justice Department trampled on congressional independence when raiding U.S. Rep. William Jefferson’s office last year, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, siding with Congress in a constitutional showdown.

In a rare textbook case involving all three branches of government, the court held that investigators violated the Constitution by reviewing legislative documents as part of a corruption investigation.

The court ordered the Justice Department to return any legislative documents it seized from the Louisiana Democrat’s office on Capitol Hill. Still undecided is whether prosecutors can use other records it confiscated as part of their bribery case against Jefferson.

You can read the full opinion here. A snippet from the opinion is below: (more…)

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy reports:

No Fourth Amendment Protection in E-Mail Addresses, IP Addresses, Ninth Circuit Holds: Commentators and Congress have long assumed that government surveillance of non-content “header” information like e-mail addresses and IP addresses, typically done by a service provider, do not violate a Fourth Amendment “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Today the Ninth Circuit became the first court to hold this directly in United States v. Forrester.

You can read the opinion here. (more…)