[IP] more on Police Blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Brock N. Meeks" <bmeeks@cox.net>
Date: July 27, 2006 5:17:35 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Police Blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd

I'm glad that Lauren brought this up.  I'm certainly no lawyer, but I've
covered enough trials to have learned a thing or two.  And it seems  
to me
that any defense attorney could reasonable argue that any such cached  
images
can't be attributed to his client with any certainty.

Unless the accused says, "this laptop has never, ever been used by  
anyone
else and has never been out of my possession," how can any court of  
law say
with any degree of certainty that anything in a browser cache was  
looked at
by the owner of the laptop?!

Perhaps it was his twisted brother or his demented boss, before  
passing the
laptop on to him (at MSNBC, where I used to work, for example, we were
routinely given laptops that had been used by four or five others,
especially when we went on field assignments).

Under this ruling, am I now responsible for my brother's or boss's or
co-workers cache?

--Brock

On 7/27/06 4:03 PM, "David Farber" <dave@farber.net> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
> Date: July 27, 2006 4:02:42 PM EDT
> To: dave@farber.net
> Cc: lauren@vortex.com
> Subject: Re: [IP] more on Police Blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd
>
>
> > The decision includes a reliance on the defendant having control of
> > the images in the cache by having "enlarged" at least one of the
> > images in the cache -- they note that the defendant clicked on some
> > thumbnail images that were in the cache to enlarge them. Except,
> > that's not the way the web works ...
>
> Dave, it's also the case that browsers may access pages through
> "prefetch" behaviors without the knowledge of the user, and without
> the user ever having seen the pages in question.  See my IP
> discussion (from about a year ago) about this relating to Google
> output results and Mozilla/Firefox browsers:
>
> http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200506/ 
> msg00190.html
>
> http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200506/ 
> msg00212.html
>
> --Lauren--
> Lauren Weinstein
> lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
> Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
> http://www.pfir.org/lauren
> Co-Founder, PFIR
>   - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
> Co-Founder, IOIC
>   - International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net
> Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
> Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
> Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
> DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com
>
>
>
>
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