dc0de wrote:

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

We lose yet another privacy right... they're falling like flies...

Worth saying that this case basically affirms the way the law has been thought to work for a long time. I mentioned in my talk at Phreaknic that its not clear that the 4th amendment applies on the Internet at all. In any event, in postal mail there was a standard that said that the cops could read envelopes and post cards but they needed a warrant to open letters. This was extended to telephones based on the idea that the phone company records the numbers you dial, and so they aren't entirely private, but the content of a call requires a special listenning device. How this works in the Internet hasn't really been fully tested by the court system because Congress issued a pre-emptive strike, called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which set up a framework for monitoring the Internet. In some cases its 4th amendment like. In others it is not. The standard set for accessing addressing information does not require a warrant.

(I'm not convinced, frankly, that its reasonable to setup a different standard for Internet contact information and content by Constitutional interpretation because they are usually both in the same place, but IANAL.)