On The Wire

The Limits of Motor Vehicle Inventory Searches

On December 23, 2018, Luke Myers was a passenger in a truck stopped by the police in Truro, Nova Scotia, for motor vehicle infractions. The truck was uninsured and the investigating police officer arranged for it to be towed to a third party lot. The driver and Mr. Myers were ...
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The Mar-a-Lago Search Warrant Case

On August 5, 2022, a search warrant was issued by federal magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that authorized the search of Mar-a-Lago, the residence of former president Donald Trump, in Palm Beach, Florida. On August 8, 2022, the FBI executed ...
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El Faro Journalists Sue Developer of Pegasus Spyware

Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli technology company, NSO Group, can access stored data on a target's mobile phone by a zero click exploit and activate the device's microphone and camera converting it into a listening and surveillance tool. American journalist, Roman Gressier, who broke a series of stories for media ...
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Russian-Canadian National Charged in LockBit Conspiracy

The United States Department of Justice has unsealed a criminal complaint charging a Russian-Canadian national as a co-conspirator in the LockBit ransomware campaign. The alleged LockBit conspiracy has globally emerged as one of the most active ransomware variants. The complaint filed in the United States District Court, District of New ...
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Splinternets: Human Rights and Internet Fragmentation

Cyberspace has been described as an unregulated mess where ransomware hawkers and data brokers peddle their wares alongside nation states, spy agencies, corporations, journalists and activists. Who governs who is up for grabs in the digital universe while some states are building their own internet in a fragmentation called the ...
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Personal Autonomy and the War on Cash

In a cashless society financial transactions are conducted with digital information by the use of credit and debit cards, mobile payments and digital currencies. The trend toward digital transactions has increased in the early twenty-first century with the development of electronic banking, intermediaries such as PayPal and digital wallet systems ...
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Russian Oligarch Indicted for Sanctions Evasion

Prominent Russian oligarch Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska and two of his associates have been charged with conspiracy to violate sanctions imposed by the United States in response to Russia's unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. The indictment in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, alleges that Mr. Deripaska ...
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Iranians Indicted In Hacking Conspiracy

The United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment yesterday charging three Iranian nationals with carrying out cyber attacks against global critical infrastructure. The targets included government entities, accounting firms and power companies. The alleged goal of the campaign was to gain unauthorized access to computers, steal data and demand ...
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Fog Reveal and the Data Brokers

The buying and selling of information is the staple of the data brokering industry. Information about income, education, ethnicity, religious beliefs, political views and geolocation data are peeled from publicly available sources that may include census records, social media sites and commercial transactions. A mass surveillance technology developed by an ...
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Do You Know What Sensitive Data Is?

Personal information is distinguishable from personally identifiable information in that the latter can be used to uniquely identify a specific individual. Both have been described as sensitive data although personal information cannot be used standing alone to uniquely identify an individual. Confidential information is another term used to describe sensitive ...
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