Judges say US Navy's illegal surveillance of private citizens is massive and egregious

[tsai3904]

9th Circuit tosses child-porn evidence, cites Navy snooping

9th Circuit judges say Naval Criminal Investigative Service has routinely probed the computers of civilians in Washington and elsewhere looking for evidence of crimes.

Navy criminal investigators repeatedly and routinely peeked into the computers of private citizens in Washington state and elsewhere, a violation of the law so “massive” and egregious that an appeals court says it has no choice but to throw out the evidence against an Algona man sentenced to 18 years in prison for distribution of child pornography.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision handed down last week, said the 2012 prosecution of Michael Allan Dreyer by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle demonstrated Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agents “routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate” the Posse Comitatus Act, a Reconstruction-era law that prohibits the military from enforcing civilian laws.

The court called the violations “extraordinary” and said evidence presented in Dreyer’s prosecution appears to show that “it has become a routine practice for the Navy to conduct surveillance of all the civilian computers in an entire state to see whether any child pornography can be found on them, and then to turn over that information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists.”

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More:
http://seattletimes.com/html/localne...yporn1xml.html

[Deborah K]

What's the big deal? They're just following suit ala NSA. smelfh!!!!

[surf]

i actually get this paper and i thought about posting this article a few days back. of course, it was accompanied on the front page by an article discussing the bureaucratic failure w/our pot market (though blaming it on the lottery winning merchants rather than the bumblef#cks that came up with all the rules, etc.)

it would feel better if this victory was about a case involving anything other than child porn.