NJ Supreme Court says cops need a wiretap to eavesdrop on your Facebook posts
newjerseymonitor.com
newjerseymonitor.com
These Facebook messages are going to someone. If the person on the other line is willing to reveal their account to law enforcement, then wiretap should not be needed.
And if a Facebook post is to a private group of all your friends then only if the other people reveal your post, should law enforcement be able to access this. Or if there is a wiretap.
This is rationality restored. Finally.
If Facebook posts count as telephony, then this varies by state. One-party consent vs two-party consent. If you dial up Bob and Bob agrees to let the police listen in, that still requires judicial approval in California. (To use as evidence in prosecution, anyways.)
On the other hand if they don't fall into the specific legal definition of what's covered by wiretapping, then they fall into the Third Part Doctrine. Which means that what you're saying applies: you gave your information to another party, you're at their whims of whether that data gets revealed.
The linked article is making a strong distinction about wiretapping specifically and the protections around it, from which I infer that everyone agrees facebook messages are legally phone calls, for whatever reason.
> The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that law enforcement must obtain a wiretap to force near-simultaneous disclosure of private social media postings
I don't think you're correct to limit it to just DMs, as a private group on Facebook would - to me - be conceptually similar to a clubhouse (or hell even a "business" as MLMs on FB are called :D) or some such. You don't lose the warrant requirement just because it's a group of people vs just 1:1.
Yes, having more people involved means a greater chance of someone simply talking to the police, but the same applies to a single person you had a conversation with in your bedroom. You do not have any legal protection against a person you talked to telling the police/government what you said (with the exception of _very_ specific set of explicitly enumerated cases), regardless of how many people were present.
But we are not talking about people voluntarily talking to the police, we're talking about secret police surveillance of a private group. What the police were asking is "can we put bugs in a private clubroom/union hall/church without a warrant?".
Also, including what china did in HK in a conversation about rule of law, human rights, etc is simply not relevant by _any_ definition.
It is , but in another way - we are finding there is little daylight between us and China in terms of surveillance.
It’s not eavesdropping if it’s public. You have a right against self incrimination; that doesn’t make confession illegal.
IANAL but I think that wasn't questioned/decided yet. Rather the ruling hinged on a question about timing/freshness, and whether the police had to use one legal standard versus another.
The state argued that getting a feed on a 15-minute delay made it a request for "stored communication" held by Facebook (subject to lesser requirements) rather than live surveillance... and the court rightly rejected that reasoning as specious.
> disclosure of private social media postings
Do I think cops should get a warrant before dragnetting your social media posts? Yeah, sure, I like that idea. Do I also think you are an idiot if you post public with no privacy settings? You bet your ass I do.