... By The Skin Of Their Teeth

Had the U.S. Attorney's Office not backed off, this could have given a whole new meaning to "grilling" a suspect.

According to court documents and attorneys ... [the defendants] were told the government had a warrant to seize the grills from their mouths and that they were being taken to a dentist in Seattle for removal. ...

Grills, made popular by rappers such as Nelly, are customized teeth caps that are typically made of precious metals and jewels. The cost for a full set can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Some styles of grills can be snapped onto the teeth somewhat like an orthodontic retainer, while others are permanently bonded to the teeth. ...

Federal prosecutors, who presented the seizure warrant to a U.S. District Court judge on March 29, said they did not know that the grills were permanently bonded to the defendants' teeth.

Membership as Probable Cause

CrimProf Blog describes a recent 9th Circuit decision:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in U.S. v. Gourde, No. 03-30262, ruled that mere membership in a pornographic website that contains both legal and illegal porn is enough to authorize the FBI to search a home computer.

I think the opinion can be read more narrowly - the court specifically references the affidavit in support of the search warrant, "The affidavit left little doubt that Gourde had paid to obtain unlimited access to images of child pornography knowingly and willingly, and not involuntary, unwittingly, or even passively", and the facts set forth in the affidavit make it exceptionally unlikely that Gourde would become and remain a member of the site without the intention of downloading images of minors. Still, it would be nice if the Court had been more explicit in its holding, for reasons Judge Kleinfeld describes in his dissent.

Is the holding of the majority opinion that if a person has subscribed to a site that has legal and illegal material, that suffices as probable cause for a search warrant? That if a person has paid money to look at material that is illegal to possess, he probably possesses it? If the holding is narrower than these formulations, everyone’s computer would be safer were the narrowing restrictions made clear. If it is not, the majority opinion is dangerous to everyone’s privacy.

It's a short step from "paid member" to "member" - broadly constructed, if you knowingly download P2P software, and know in using it that you can download pirated music files, software, copyrighted images, and probably also illegal pornography, would that be enough for a warrant? What if the authorities could also demonstrate that you had used the P2P software to access a hard drive which stores some unlawful material, had run searches which caused unlawful material to appear among your results (whether or not you downloaded it), or had downloaded illegal material (even though that might not have been apparent from the file name)? Even with paid membership, how much illegal content must be present on the site and how obvious must it be before you can potentially be the subject of a search warrant?

This assertion by the majority also raises my eyebrow:

Thanks to the long memory of computers, any evidence of a crime was almost certainly still on his computer, even if he had tried to delete the images. FBI computer experts, cited in the affidavit, stated that “even if . . . graphic image files[ ] have been deleted . . . these files can easily be restored.”

Is the FBI agent assuming an unsophisticated computer user who thinks that dragging icons into the trash "deletes" the associated file? Is that a reasonable assumption? And to say "easily" seems glib. I know a law firm which could have used that FBI agent a while back, when they accidentally deleted a large folder of documents from their server and somehow rendered the files unrecoverable (short of pulling the hard drive and submitting it to a data recovery service).

Back to Boot Camp

The Times states,

Now Apple has announced Boot Camp, which will allow some versions of Windows to run more or less natively on an Apple machine. ...

So the prospect of Boot Camp raises two very different scenarios. Windows users will buy Apple machines to run Windows. Or they may try out Apple's operating system just for the fun of it and get hooked.

Or maybe Mac users who want to be able to run some PC programs will find Boot Camp convenient, and far superior "Virtual PC" emulator software. Or maybe it will help convince people who want to transition away from Windows, which is substantially inferior to Mac OS X, but want relative certainty that they will be able to access their old files in the new system.

Telemarketers Are So Special....

I don't think I've gone a day this week without being hit by a telemarketer offering online promotion of my legal practice. The latest one said that they have a special technique which gets their clients' sites listed above all the other listings in Google. (Because AdWords is such a big secret.)

If these companies are so good at online promotion, why are they using telemarketers? And if these companies are so good at law firm promotion, why do they have so many practice areas available in my "territory"? "You want personal injury? No? How about family law? Criminal defense? Employment discrimination?" Well, no, I really don't.

Insults Between Academics

Prof. David Bernstein writes of an insult once uttered by one of his law professors:

When I was a student at Yale, one of my professors, the author of eminently forgettable and inconsequential works on law and economics, referred to Prof. Siegan as "that nut from San Diego, what's his name?"

Calling another academic a "nut from San Diego"? How inappropriate.

Declining NetFlix Service

(I'm not talking about their intentionally slow service for people whom they deem to be returning movies too quickly. I'm also not speaking of their seemingly chronic problem with ordering too few copies of newly released films to reasonably satisfy customer demand.)

Over the past two months my experience with NetFlix has involved repeated problems with movies being lost (and ultimately found) in the mail. They made an unexplained mistake in shipping one of the movies on my queue which, as a result, shows a "Shipped" date of "3/06/06" and a "Est. Arrival" date of "3/28/06" - twenty-two days! I have had two other movies "lost" in shipment to me, one due to an envelope coming apart in the mail (I received the portion of the envelope with my address on it - the part you tear off and discard before returning the movie) and another that simply didn't arrive (but was later found by NetFlix).

The processing time for returns is often much longer than it used to be, and now often seems to be three or four business days, and I don't believe that the USPS is responsible. It also seems to be more common for them to mail the new movie one or two business days after their receipt of a return.

I will grant that this could just be bad luck - a statistical anomaly which is unfortunately affecting my account. Are other Netflix subscribers having a better experience?

Moments from April Fool's Day History

Google's April Fool's Day joke reminds me of a similar joke from many years back, in the dark ages where the Internet was largely text-based. A clever prankster wrote a personality quiz which he promised would allow him to make highly promising romantic matches between those who took the quiz. In fact all matches that he made were random - yet some nonetheless developed into long-term relationships.

(Had he patented that joke as a business model, might he be able to extract licensing fees from eHarmony? Just a question....)