Fourth Amendment’s Future if Gov’t Uses Virtual Force and Trojan Horse Warrants?
An interesting paper discussed the future of the Fourth Amendment in the cyber world. Can the government legally deploy malware for eavesdropping and remote searches, in order to investigate and control potential criminal activity? This is part one of looking at Susan Brenner’s paper, Fourth Amendment Future: Remote Computer Searches and the Use of Virtual Force.
By Ms. Smith on Tue, 11/08/11 – 2:24pm.
It’s a huge day on the privacy front, where technology, privacy and the Constitution had a head-on collision, and now the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about and “seeing shades of 1984” in warrantless GPS tracking. The future of the Fourth Amendment looks a bit bleak in this digital age, so I hope SCOTUS does the right thing for the USA. Along those lines of surveillance without a warrant, I read an interesting paper about the Fourth Amendment in the cyber world and the government deploying malware for eavesdropping in order to investigate and control potential criminal activity. It provoked some deep, unpleasant, and yet realistic thoughts about how much virtual force is done now via stealthy spying Trojans which are launched by law enforcement for remote computer searches.
Susan W. Brenner, of the University of Dayton School of Law, wrote: Fourth Amendment Future: Remote Computer Searches and the Use of Virtual Force. She divided her focus into two main topics. The abstract states, “The first is the use of certain types of software, most notably Trojan horse programs, to conduct surreptitious, remote searches of computers and computer media. The other tactic is the use of ‘virtual force,’ e.g., using Distributed Denial of Service and other attacks to shut down or otherwise disable websites that host offending content and/or activities.”
