Professor Danielle Keats Citron on the criminalization of “revenge porn” and a cyber civil rights agenda

A recent CNN opinion by Professor Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center on Internet and Society and Yale Information Society Project, calls for the criminal law to take action in deterring and punishing “revenge porn.” Jeffery defined revenged porn in an earlier post as an individual posting “nude images of someone they know on the Internet - often doing so after the end of a relationship.”  As Professor Citron details, the impact...

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McAfree releases "Threats Report: Second Quarter 2013"

A recent blog post by McAfee, a computer software company and subsidiary of Intel Corporation, introduced readers to the McAfee Labs cyberthreat report for the second quarter of 2013.  McAfee Threats Report: Second Quarter 2013 was prepared by McAfee Lab's personnel Toralv Dirro, Paula Greve, Haifei Li, François Paget, Vadim Pogulievsky, Craig Schmugar, Jimmy Shah, Ryan Sherstobitoff, Dan Sommer, Bing Sun, Adam Wosotowsky, and Chong Xu. According to the Report's introduction McAfee Labs researchers have analyzed the threats of the second...

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Website Banner Defeats Numerous Fourth Amendment Objections in CP Case

A federal district judge recently held in a child pornography (CP) case that the website's banner doubly defeated any Fourth Amendment objection to an investigator's use of the site to collect evidence of possession and distribution of CP. The case, United States v. Bode, No. 1:12-cr-00158-ELH (D. Md. Aug. 21, 2013), rests on evidence developed by a government investigator (Burdick) who was granted administrator-level access to a website where the defendant (Bode) was allegedly posting CP. The website in question (which has since been shut down)...

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Around the Net: Deleting your Internet presence, More on Silk Road, Credit ratings based on Facebook friends, and more

Here are a few links to some good articles from around the Internet: Find out how to delete all of your data on social networking sites in a one-stop website with this article on Wired. The Economist discusses Silk Road which "allows dealers in drugs and other illegal products to meet online without leaving any trace of their identity." (Read more from Cybercrime Review on Silk Road here.) New companies evaluate credit worthiness based on your Facebook friends. Find out more from CNN Money. Miss Teen USA uses position and personal experiences...

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Featured Paper: Upcoming law review article addresses cell tower dumps and the Fourth Amendment

A recently accepted article in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law addresses the use of cell tower dumps by law enforcement. A tower dump allows police to request the phone numbers of all phones that connected to a specific tower within a given period of time (see a prior post about the type of process needed for tower dumps here). The article by Texas Tech Visiting Assistant Professor Brian Owsley, "The Fourth Amendment Implications of the Government's Use of Cell Tower Dumps in its Electronic Surveillance",...

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New CFAA Complaints - Civil employee disloyalty cases dominate, reinforcing shift away statute's anti-hacking genesis

Cybercrime Review will now be posting, on an ongoing basis, new complaints alleging CFAA violations. This serves two purposes: (1) to make our readers aware of new cases that may be worth following, and (2) to provide a survey of how CFAA litigation has evolved as courts have grappled with the scope and purpose of the statute. August filings of note: Clinton Rubin v. Pickens, No. 13-CV-04483 (E.D. P.A. Aug. 2, 2013) - relevant text: 91. Based on this initial research, Burns and Smith further investigated Defendants' actions prior to and following...

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District court finds government "failed to meet its burden through and through" in child pornography restitution case

In United States v. Loreng, No. 12-132 (D.D.C. 2013), the district court denied an award of restitution to child pornography victims "Amy" and "Cindy" after strongly criticizing the prosecution. The way in which restitution is awarded in child pornography cases has been addressed by most circuits, including the D.C. Circuit. The predominant issues are whether a defendant is required to have proximately caused harm to the victim and whether the defendant is liable for the entire damages or only a fraction. See my previous posts on the issue...

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Must Read: Lawful Hacking: Using Existing Vulnerabilities for Wiretapping on the Internet

Steven M. Bellovin (Columbia), Matt Blaze (Penn), Sandy Clark (Penn), and Susan Landau (Harvard; Sun Microsystems) have posted an incredible paper that was presented at the Privacy Legal Scholars Conference in June 2013. The paper is entitled "Lawful Hacking: Using Existing Vulnerabilities for Wiretapping on the Internet"; I have a general aversion to the term "must read," so my use of that term is indicative of the quality of the content.  The abstract: For years, legal wiretapping was straightforward: the officer doing the intercept connected...

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Feds decrypt two hard drives in Wisconsin case, defendant arrested on CP charges

Over the past several months, I've written a few times about the ongoing Wisconsin encryption case. Here are the posts for background. Defense suggests improprieties in Wisconsin encryption case Wisconsin federal magistrate reverses on forced production of decrypted data after government presents new evidence Wisconsin federal court forbids forced production of decrypted data on Fifth Amendment grounds The feds had been unable to break the encryption on the defendant's hard drives, but a major breakthrough last week resulted in the defendant's...

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"The age of narcotics e-commerce has arrived" says Andy Greenberg, demonstrates Silk Road online drug purchase in Forbes article

Andy Greenberg, a Forbes journalist focusing on technology, privacy, and information security topics, authored two startling articles about the online drug market. Both Justin and Jeffery have touched on the increased attention that online drug markets (like Silk Road, the focus of Greenberg's articles) have received over the past year. Greenberg's recent reports, however, provide a new look into the illicit trade, and both articles are a must read. Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, The Man Behind Booming Black Market Drug Website Silk Road, Forbes,...

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Virginia man pleads guilty after posting Craigslist ads which sent nearly 100 men to victim's house for sex

A 61-year-old Virginia man pled guilty yesterday to stalking and identification fraud charges after having made over 160 posts on Craigslist in order to have men go to his ex-girlfriend's house seeking sexual encounters. The posts, over 100 of which were made while at his job at the Library of Congress, contained the victim's home address and photograph. According to the United States Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia, Between January and March 2013 more than 100 men appeared at or around the victim’s home seeking sexual...

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Second LulzSec hacker sentenced in California federal court

According to a press release issued by federal prosecutors on Thursday, August 8, 2013,  Raynaldo Rivera (known online as "neuron") "was sentenced  . . . to one year and one day in federal prison for participating in an extensive computer attack that compromised the computer systems of Sony Pictures Entertainment." According to the release, District Judge John A. Kronstadt with the Central District Court of California ordered Rivera to "13 months of home detention, to perform 1,000 hours of community service and to pay $605, 663...

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Police in Mississippi investigating Twitter parody accounts

Police in a small Mississippi town are investigating the ownership of two parody Twitter accounts. According to the Clarion-Ledger, one of the accounts was created after the city's Chief Administration Officer was fired by the Board of Aldermen and the other after a veto by the mayor was overridden by the board. The two accounts were supposedly labeled as parodies, but the yet-to-be-discovered account owner(s) could end up facing criminal charges under a 2011 Mississippi law. The statute made it a misdemeanor to impersonate another person on the...

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Five hackers indicted in New Jersey federal court for "largest known data breach conspiracy"

UPDATE: The title of this article has been edited to avoid any confusion. A grand jury sitting for the District Court of New Jersey returned an indictment against the named defendants. The district court did not itself indict the defendants. My apologies for any who many have misinterpreted the original heading. The Department of Justice announced last Thursday, July 25, 2013, that a federal indictment has been issued charging five individuals from Russia and Ukraine for one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, one count of conspiracy...

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Defense suggests improprieties in Wisconsin encryption case

Several months ago I wrote about an encryption case in Wisconsin where the magistrate had ordered production of the decrypted data, and then the district court judge suspended the order. Since then, several interesting things have happened. First, the prosecution argued that the defendant could forget the password so he needed to provide it, and it could be kept by a third party. Now, the defense is arguing that prosecutors may have "intentionally or recklessly mislead the court," according to an article published last week by the Journal...

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