The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday affirmed the 2019 conviction and sentencing of Carsten Igor Rosenow for sexually exploiting children in the Philippines – and, in the process, the court may have blown a huge hole in internet privacy law.
The court appears to have given US government agents its blessing to copy anyone’s internet account data without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing – despite the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. UC Berkeley School of Law professor Orin Kerr noted the decision with dismay.
“Holy crap: Although it was barely mentioned in the briefing, the CA9 just held in a single sentence, in a precedential opinion, that internet content preservation isn’t a seizure,” he wrote in a Twitter post. “And TOS [Terms of Service] eliminate all internet privacy.”
The case at issue, US v. Rosenow, begins in October, 2014, when online money transfer service Xoom alerted Yahoo! to a number of Yahoo accounts involved in the buying and selling of child sexual abuse material. The convicted felon was formerly chief marketing officer for biotech biz Illumina.
Yahoo! investigated, reported its findings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and subsequently involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
www.theregister.com/2022/04/28/appeals_court_privacy/