from news.cnet.com:
High Court judge finds search warrants were too general and rules the data in cloned drives should not have been released to the FBI.
The U.S. piracy case against MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom appears to have run aground, with a New Zealand court ruling that the search warrants issued in January were invalid.
New Zealand High Court Judge Helen Winkelmann ruled Thursday that the warrants did not adequately describe the offenses alleged, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald. "Indeed they fell well short of that," she said. "They were general warrants, and as such, are invalid."
She also ruled that it was unlawful for the data confiscated in the raid to have been sent offshore, saying "the release of the cloned hard drives to the FBI for shipping to the United States was contrary to the 16 February direction" [given by the court] "that the items seized were to remain in the custody and control of the Commissioner of Police."
MegaUpload is a cloud-storage locker that DotCom claims was completely legitimate and protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. U.S. officials, who are trying to extradite Dotcom and six associates to face piracy and wire fraud charges, say he encouraged users to store pirated videos, music, software, and other media and then share them with others. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
from threat level:
Bowing to the Obama administration, a federal appeals court Monday gutted its own decision that had dramatically narrowed the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.
The 9-2 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nullifies Miranda-style guidelines the court promulgated last year that were designed to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights during court-authorized computer searches. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, as solicitor general last year, had urged the court to reverse itself amid complaints that federal prosecutions were being complicated, and computer searches were grinding to a halt, because of the detailed guidelines.
The original ruling required the government to cull specific data described in the search warrant, rather than copy entire hard drives. When that’s not possible, the feds were advised to use an independent third party under the court’s supervision, whose job it would be to comb through the files for the specific information, and provide it, and nothing else, to the government. The ruling said judges should “deny the warrant altogether” if the government does not consent to such a plan in data-search cases...
Monday’s 58-page ruling (.pdf) in a rehearing of the case still excludes the evidence, and reiterates that law enforcement cannot use seized materials in a computer search that are beyond the scope of the warrant. But the ruling omits the detailed guidance to which the Obama administration had objected.
