Monthly Archives: August 2017

Symposium: Will the Fourth Amendment protect 21st-century data? The court confronts the third-party doctrine – SCOTUSblog (blog)

Posted: August 3, 2017 at 9:57 am

Posted Wed, August 2nd, 2017 12:21 pm by Jennifer Lynch

Jennifer Lynch is a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of Timothy Carpenters petition for certiorari in Carpenter v. United States.

This summer, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Carpenter v. United States, a case that offers the court another chance to address just how far the Fourth Amendments protections against warrantless searches and seizures extend to cover information generated by the modern technologies we rely on every day.

In Carpenter, the FBI accessed location data linked to Timothy Carpenters and his co-defendants cell phones in its attempt to place the suspects at the sites of several robberies. But the data the FBI asked for and received werent limited to the days and times of the known robberies they also included months of records that could reveal everywhere the defendants were every time they made or received a phone call. And the FBI got all of this information without a warrant.

The specific data at issue in the case are called cell-site-location information, or CSLI. These data, maintained by wireless carriers, are records of the cell towers our phones connect to every time they try to send and receive calls, texts, emails and any other information. The records generated hundreds and sometimes thousands of times per day include the precise GPS coordinates of each tower as well as the day and time the phone tried to connect to it. While this all may sound complicated, the important point is that, in cases like this one, the government argues that CSLI is really just a proxy for where the phone and, by extension, the phones owner is or has been.

Police ask for these records a lot in 2016, Verizon and AT&T alone received about 125,000 requests for CSLI and each request may involve months of information on multiple people. No federal statutes place any specific restrictions on how much data the police can ask for at any one time, and the standard required to obtain access whether there are specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe the data are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation is much lower than probable cause. As a result, cases like this one, in which the government obtained 88 days and 127 days worth of location information for each defendant, appear to be the norm. (In another cert petition filed this past term, Graham v. United States, the police accessed 221 days of CSLI for each defendant.)

In Carpenter, the Supreme Court will address whether access to this information is a search under the Fourth Amendment and whether that search requires a warrant. The issues raised in this case are important because location information like CSLI shows where we are and where we have been. And where we travel can reveal very sensitive details about our lives. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her concurring opinion in United States v. Jones, location information can provide the government with a precise, comprehensive record of a persons public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. Or, as the lower court in Jones put it, [a] person who knows all of anothers travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groupsand not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.

Despite the sensitive nature of location data and the volume of information collected in Carpenter and other cases, five federal appellate courts, in deeply divided opinions, have held that historical CSLI isnt protected by the Fourth Amendment in large part because the information is collected and stored by third-party service providers. The courts have relied on a legal principle called the third-party doctrine, which was developed in two 1970s Supreme Court cases, Smith v. Maryland and United States v. Miller. This principle holds that information you voluntarily share with someone else whether that someone else is your bank (such as deposit and withdrawal information) or the phone company (the numbers you dial on your phone) isnt protected by the Fourth Amendment because you cant expect that third party to keep the information secret. By sharing that information with a third party, you have assumed the risk that it will be shared with others.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and many others have argued that its time for the Supreme Court to revisit this outdated doctrine. As Sotomayor noted in Jones, the third-party doctrine is ill suited to the digital age. This is because, as she also noted, we live in an era in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. We use cellphones to stay in touch with friends and family on the go, store data in the cloud to be able to access it anywhere later, rely on GPS mapping technologies to find our way about town, and wear activity trackers to try to improve our health. Its impossible to use any of these technologies without sharing data with third parties.

This dilemma highlights a key weakness in this line of the Supreme Courts Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: Assuming that it is unreasonable to expect privacy when we share something with others makes secrecy a prerequisite for privacy. But Justice Thurgood Marshall recognized in his dissent in Smith years ago that [p]rivacy is not a discrete commodity, possessed absolutely or not at all. That an individual discloses information to a third party for one purpose does not mean he believes he has relinquished all privacy interests in that information. Nor is it clear that such a belief would be good for society. To maintain secrecy as a prerequisite for Fourth Amendment safeguards would mean that information once protected in the non-digital world would lose that protection today.

Some third-party cases at the Supreme Court and federal appellate courts have recognized that sharing information with others doesnt always equal blanket disclosure to all. The court has held that patients have a reasonable expectation of privacy in diagnostic test results, even when the hospital maintains the records (Ferguson v. City of Charleston); passengers retain an expectation of privacy in luggage placed in an overhead bin despite the possibility of external inspection by others (Bond v. United States); and hotel guests are entitled to constitutional protections even though they provide implied or express permission for third parties to access their rooms (Stoner v. California). And at least one lower court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in United States v. Warshak, has ruled that people have an expectation of privacy in email content, even if they use a third party service provider to transmit that email.

Thus, the main challenge for the Supreme Court in Carpenter will be to figure out how to reset the parameters of the third-party doctrine for the digital age or do away with it altogether.

One thing is clear: These thorny issues are not going away. How the Supreme Court decides this case will have important ramifications for the future especially for the internet of things, where sensors and devices in our homes, on our cars, and throughout our world will constantly collect, generate, and share data about us with little to no volition on our part. Choosing to participate in society in the 21st century will require use of these technologies; it shouldnt require us to relinquish our constitutional rights.

Posted in Carpenter v. U.S., Summer symposium on Carpenter v. United States, Featured, Merits Cases

Recommended Citation: Jennifer Lynch, Symposium: Will the Fourth Amendment protect 21st-century data? The court confronts the third-party doctrine, SCOTUSblog (Aug. 2, 2017, 12:21 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/08/symposium-will-fourth-amendment-protect-21st-century-data-court-confronts-third-party-doctrine/

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Traffic Stop and Request to Search Did Not Violate the Fourth Amendment – WisBar

Posted: at 9:57 am


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Traffic Stop and Request to Search Did Not Violate the Fourth Amendment
WisBar
Aug. 2, 2017 A sheriff's deputy ran a man's license plates in high crime area in Kenosha and learned the vehicle's registration was suspended for emissions violations. Recently, the state supreme court ruled the subsequent stop and search, which ...

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The Second Amendment has won (again) in Washington. So why won’t the Supreme Court fully enforce it? – Fox News

Posted: at 9:56 am

Washington, D.C. residents, you dont have to holster your Second Amendment rights anymore. Unfortunately, residents of many other states like California dont have the same ability that D.C. residents now do to protect themselves.

In a stirring victory for those who live in the nationals capital, a panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals recently threw out a D.C. ordinance that denied concealed-carry permits to anyone who could not show a special need for self-defense, what is referred to as a good reason requirement. The problem is that other courts of appeal have upheld such restrictive laws and the U.S. Supreme Court has turned down appeals of those decisions, refusing to take up the issue of the Second Amendments application to carrying a weapon outside of the home.

This happened most recently at the very end of the Supreme Courts 2017 term in June when it refused to take up Peruta v. California, an appeal of a decision of the Ninth Circuit upholding Californias good reason requirement.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by Neil Gorsuch) castigated the other justices for treating the Second Amendment as a disfavored right. He said it was long-past time for the Court to decide this issue and that he found it extremely improbable that the Framers understood the Second Amendment to protect little more than carrying a gun from the bedroom to the kitchen.

In the opinion over the District of Columbias concealed carry law written by Judge Thomas Griffith of the D.C. Circuit, Griffith pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Courts first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment occurred in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, where the Court threw out D.C.s complete ban on handguns as unconstitutional.

That decision is younger than the first iPhone. The Supreme Court did not outline how the Second Amendment applies to the carrying of a weapon in public, but as Griffith says, Heller reveals the Second Amendment erects some absolute barriers than no gun law may breach.

After Heller, D.C. implemented a complete ban on concealed carry. That was struck down in 2014 in Palmer v. District of Columbia. D.C. responded by restricting concealed-carry permits only to those who could show a good reason to fear injury. That required showing a special need for self-protection distinguishable from the general community as supported by evidence of specific threats or previous attacks.

Living in a high-crime neighborhood wasnt a good enough reason for a concealed-carry permit under D.C.s regulation. In essence, you had to prove you had a good reason to exercise your constitutional right, a bizarre situation unique in American constitutional jurisprudence.

D.C. argued, absurdly enough, that its ordinance did not violate any constitutional right because the Second Amendment doesnt apply outside of the home.

Judge Griffith dismissed this claim, saying that the fact that the need for self-defense is most pressing in the home doesnt mean that self-defense at home is the only right at the [Second] Amendments core.

Obviously, the need for self-defense might arise beyond as well as within the home. Further, the Second Amendments text protects the right to bear as well as keep arms. Thus, it is natural that the core of the Second Amendment includes a law-abiding citizens right to carry common firearms for self-defense beyond the home.

Even under Heller, governments can apply regulations on the possession and carrying of firearms that are longstanding, such as bans on possession by felons or bans on carrying near sensitive sites such as government buildings. But preventing carrying in public is not a longstanding tradition or rule.

This opinion goes into detail discussing the long American and English history applicable to weapons and self-defense, going back as far as the Statute of Northampton of 1328 -- whose text, as the court says, will remind Anglophiles of studying Canterbury Tales in the original. But the state of the law in Chaucers England or for that matter Shakespeares or Cromwells is not decisive here.

What is decisive is that the Supreme Court established in Heller that by the time of the Founding, the preexisting right enshrined by the Amendment had ripened to include carrying more broadly than the District contends based on its reading of the 14th-century statute. According to Griffith, the individual right to carry common firearms beyond the home for self-defense even in densely populated areas, even for those lacking special self-defense needs falls within the core of the Second Amendments protections.

Unfortunately, other federal courts of appeals have upheld similar good reason laws for concealed carry permits. But as Judge Griffith points out, those courts dispensed with the historic digging that would have exposed that their toleration of regulations restricting the carrying of a weapon is faulty.

The constitutional analysis that should be applied to all government gun regulations is that they must allow gun access at least for each typical member of the American public. Because D.C.s restrictive good reason concealed-carry law bars most people from exercising their Second Amendment right at all, it is unconstitutional. At a minimum, the Second Amendment must protect carrying given the risks and needs typical of law-abiding citizens.

The court drew together all the pieces of its analysis in this way:

At the Second Amendments core lies the right of responsible citizens to carry firearms for personal self-defense beyond the home, subject to longstanding restrictions. These traditional limits include, for instance, licensing requirements, but not bans on carrying in urban areas like D.C. or bans on carrying absent a special need for self-defense. In fact, the Amendments core at a minimum shields the typically situated citizens ability to carry common arms generally. The Districts good-reason law is necessarily a total ban on exercises of that constitutional right for most D.C. residents. Thats enough to sink this law under Heller I.

One of the judges on the D.C. panel, Karen LeCraft Henderson, dissented, arguing that the core right in the Second Amendment is only to possess a firearm in ones home and she saw no problem with D.C.s good-reason requirement.

That dissent, along with the contrary decisions of other appeals courts, shows why the Supreme Court needs to follow Justice Thomass admonition and finally settle this issue. As Thomas scolds in his dissent in Peruta:

For those of us who work in marble halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous. But the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a State denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it.

Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former Justice Department official. He is coauthor of Whos Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.

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Collins proposes new measures for protecting Second Amendment rights – Wyoming County Free Press

Posted: at 9:56 am

Congressman Chris Collins (NY-27) has proposed new measures for protecting Second Amendment rights by introducing legislation to limit states authority when it comes to regulating rifles and shotguns, commonly used by sportsmen and sportswomen.

The Second Amendment Guarantee Act (SAGA) would prevent states from implementing any regulations on these weapons that are more restrictive than what is required by federal law. Upon passage of this bill, most of the language included in New York States Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act of 2013 signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo would be void.

This legislation would protect the Second Amendment rights of New Yorkers that were unjustly taken away by Andrew Cuomo,Collins said.I am a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment and have fought against all efforts to condemn these rights. I stand with the law-abiding citizens of this state that have been outraged by the SAFE Act and voice my commitment to roll back these regulations.

Governor Cuomos SAFE Act violates federal regulation and the following provisions would be void under the proposed legislation:

-Cuomos SAFE Act expanded rifle and shotgun bans to include semi-automatic guns with detachable magazines that possess certain features.

-The Cuomo SAFE Act banned the capacity of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.It further limited magazines to seven rounds at any time.

In the Collins bill, States or local governments would not be able to regulate, prohibit, or require registration and licensing (that are any more restrictive under Federal law) for the sale, manufacturing, importation, transfer, possession, or marketing of a rifle or shotgun. Additionally, rifle or shotgun includes any part of the weapon including any detachable magazine or ammunition feeding devise and any type of pistol grip or stock design.

Under this legislation, any current or future laws enacted by a state or political subdivision that exceeds federal law for rifles and shotguns would be void. Should a state violate this law, and a plaintiff goes to court, the court will award the prevailing plaintiff a reasonable attorneys fee in addition to any other damages.

Congressman Collins was joined today by local, county, and state elected officials and citizen supporters of the Second Amendment during events to unveil his bill in Erie and Monroe counties.

Hamburg Rod and Gun Club:

Assemblyman David DiPietro

Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard

Erie County Comptroller Stefan Mychajliw

Erie County Legislator Ted Morton

Representatives from SCOPE

Rochester Brooks Gun Club:

Senator Rich Funke

Senator Rob Ortt

Assemblyman Peter Lawrence

Monroe County Legislator Karla Boyce

Representatives from SCOPE

To read the text of H.R. 3576, the Second Amendment Guarantee Act, clickhere.

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MMA Legend Royce Gracie On The Second Amendment – The Daily Caller

Posted: at 9:56 am

If youve heard of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, mixed-martial arts or the UFC, the reason is Royce Gracie. In the early 1990s, his dominance of the octagon brought his familys style of jiu-jitsu into the American mainstream, and the martial art has become immensely popular around the world ever since. In addition to his hand-to-hand combat skills, Gracie is also a fan of firearms and the Second Amendment. Shooting Illustrated Editor-in-Chief Ed Friedman sat down with Gracie to discuss his career, his love of freedom and his interest in guns.

SI: How did you get interested in firearms?

Royce Gracie: Growing up in Brazil, my dad had a few guns on our farm. Its part of martial arts. Sure, they say its empty hands, but so many styles use weapons, so its part of the martial arts culture. When I came to America and saw the freedom that we have, I was blown away. Back in the early days, we had a friend who would take us to the range, and wed shoot 100 rounds through a .45 ACP 1911. Our goal was to make the bullseye disappear, and I got the shooting bug. Shooting is an art. You need to know what youre doing, how to be safe, to recognize the skill needed to control that power. Its a lot like martial arts in that way.

SI: What makes someone who is so skilled in unarmed self-defense feel the need to own firearms?

Royce Gracie: What if theres more than one person? What if the adversary is armed? If its just one guy whos not armed, yeah, I can take care of him. But what if he pulls a gun? What if theres more than one attacker and they have knives? What happens if theres a terrorist attack? Ive got a mentality that Im going to try to stop an attack no matter what, but if hes got a gun, thats suicidal if Im not armed. Also, if a criminal is attacking other people, its not always feasible for even someone with my skills to stop that attack without a firearm.

Attackers arent going to make it a fair fight. They launch surprise assaults; they try to take you out to get to your family or your property. Its not the octagon. Theres no referee. And if he pulls a weapon, hes not just trying to fight mehes trying to kill me. At that point, youd be crazy to try to go hand to hand. I have a gun to defend myself if the situation escalates like that.

SI: Tell me a little about the situation in Brazil as it pertains to gun ownership and crime.

Royce Gracie: Brazil never had the degree of freedom we have in the U.S., but you used to be able to buy some guns. There were restrictions, but there were shops we could go to. Then, they essentially banned civilian ownership guns in what they said was an effort to fight crime. That resulted in the criminals arming themselves to the teeth. I mean, they had RPGs and machine guns. They get it from corrupt officials. Violence got out of control after that. It was like the law switched to protect the bad guys. So at the same time they disarmed the law-abiding citizens, they made life easier on the criminals. The murder rate went through the roof. Its so bad, the prisoners in jails get better food than the police!

SI: Why do people sign up for your classes? What is it about Brazilian jiu-jitsu that is so popular?

Royce Gracie: The main reason people go to any martial arts school is to gain confidence by learning skills. They may have had something happen to them or seen a situation that they didnt know how to react to. That stays with themthey dont go right away to learn about self-defense, but that thought stays filed away. Then one day a friend will say Hey, Im learning this martial art; lets go check it out. Then they go to class and start to get the hang of it. Its a lot of the same reasons why people buy a gun for the first time. People realize theyre vulnerable, but it often takes a while. Its not like they see a fight and say, I need to learn a martial art, but a while later that thought comes to the front and they sign up for a class. Its really all about the skills you need to be confident. Parents sign their kids up for the same reason; for the confidence that can come with the discipline that martial arts provide.

SI: What can people expect to learn in a Royce Gracie-taught class?

Royce Gracie: I teach them self-defense. I dont teach competition. Martial arts were made to defend yourself. A lot of schools teach you how to score points, but thats not real life. Competition can ruin a martial art. I teach how to defend yourself in a street-fight situation. Why do you buy a gun? Sure, there are a small number of people who want to be the best competitive shooter in the world, but for most of us, its for self-defense. And maybe that leads to competition, which is fine, but thats not why you signed up for a martial arts class or why you bought that first gun.

SI: What drew you to the NRA? How important is the Second Amendment to you?

Royce Gracie: TheNational Rifle Associationis the front line of keeping my right to keep and bear arms. Thats the way I look at it. I really respect the NRA, because I know from experience, from what happened to Brazil, how important the Second Amendment is. It is my right to defend myself, and the NRA makes sure that right will be there. Look what happened when they took those rights away in Brazil, in Venezuelait is vital to keep that right.

Want to take a class with Royce Gracie? VisitNRACarryGuardExpo.comtoday to sign up for the (limited-space) Brazilian jiu-jitsu class he will teach at the inaugural Carry Guard Expo in Milwaukee, WI, Aug. 25 to 27. Gracie will teach paying attendees several moves that could come in handy should you find yourself in a close-quarters criminal attack. He will also be signing autographs at the show. In addition, there will be seminars from world-class instructors like Steve Tarani, Travis Doc T and many others, so you wont want to miss the best event for those interested in self-defense.

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Peter Berger: Students and First Amendment rights – vtdigger.org

Posted: at 9:56 am

Editors note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes Poor Elijahs Almanack. The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.

Over recent decades, public schools have been drafted to play Hemingway while the rest of us have taken turns impersonating Joyce.

This brings us in a roundabout way to the First Amendment.

The Founding Fathers were adamant that free speech and a free press are essential for the health and survival of a free republic. I agree with Benjamin Franklin that there is no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. In a day where we see the press corralled, berated and threatened at campaign rallies, and where the president echoes Stalin and Mao to declare our free press the enemies of the people, Im especially leery about any abridgement of anyones free speech rights.

However, I tell my students that the First Amendment doesnt mean you can say whatever you want whenever you want to. The government limits citizens speech all the time without violating the Constitution in a judges courtroom, in my classroom during instruction and tests, and, borrowing from Justice Holmes, by barring us from knowingly and falsely shouting Fire in a crowded theater.

The nexus of free speech and classrooms is important to me as a teacher not only because of my ardor for the First Amendment, but also because it illustrates societys failure to grasp classroom reality which brings us back to Joyce and Hemingway.

Courts have clarified students free speech rights in several signal decisions. In a Vietnam-era student protest case, the Supreme Court ruled that students and teachers dont shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate, and that schools can suppress student political speech only if that speech would materially and substantially interfere with the schools mission and operation.

One concurring opinion stipulated that students free speech rights are not the same as or co-extensive with those of adults. A dissenting justice expressed what he considered the courts consensus that school officials should be granted the widest authority in maintaining discipline and good order unless their limitations on students speech are motivated by their own political opinions. Going further in his dissent, another justice warned that the courts decision effectively compels the teachers, parents, and elected school officials to surrender control of the American public school system to public school students.

Two decades later the court clarified its position in a case involving a student who used sexually suggestive language and lewd innuendo in a campaign speech at a school assembly. This time the courts majority held that while the First Amendment protects some offensive forms of speech for adults, the same latitude of expression is not permitted to children in a public school. Officials concern for the sensibilities of other students constitutes a legitimate reason to limit student speech.

These precedent-setting rulings bear on a more recent case that affords a look at decisions that officials including judges make and how they dont reflect but do affect real students and teachers like me. The case this time featured breast cancer awareness bracelets bearing the inscription I (heart) boobies. Administrators banned the bracelets as vulgar and inappropriate for middle school. When two female students defied the ban and were suspended, they sued the district for violating their First Amendment right to free speech.

The schools attorney argued that the I love boobies message pushes the limits of propriety in public schools, undercuts efforts to maintain reasonable decorum, and disrupts the schools proper focus on education. He asserted that administrators should be able to prohibit the use of lewd language to convey political or social messages when the same message can be conveyed in a more decorous manner without lewd language.

The ACLU lawyer representing the students countered that I love boobies did not reasonably pose a substantial material disruption to learning and middle school student behavior.

A series of federal courts eventually concluded that the boobies bracelets were not plainly lewd and were protected as a commentary on a social issue, specifically breast cancer. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on appeal, which left standing the lower courts decision and overturned the districts ban.

Its worth noting that at the same time this federal court in Pennsylvania was outlawing the ban, a federal court in Indiana was ruling that a school in its jurisdiction could impose a ban on the same boobies bracelets.

Lets set aside the vagaries of our federal court structure, and the image of 13 robed federal jurists discussing boobies for a full hour. Lets also agree that fighting breast cancer is worthwhile.

The principal of the school, herself a breast cancer survivor, banned the bracelets as imposing a substantial risk of disruption and distraction. In contrast, while conceding that there are always immature boys, one of the student plaintiffs opined, But I dont think its that disruptive.

Who should get to decide how much disruption is too much a seventh-grader or the school principal?

Before you answer, consider the T-shirt promoting testicular cancer awareness, also in current circulation, that bears the message, I love balls. How about the bisexual female high school student who came to school wearing a shirt declaring I Enjoy Vagina? Do we allow this as protected speech regarding her sexual preference? Do we allow a male student to wear the same shirt? How about the male football team?

The courts have ruled that administrators decisions must turn on whether they can reasonably forecast that the speech in question will disrupt education, violate other students rights, or obstruct appropriate discipline. No one can better judge what could likely disrupt a particular school than the principal and teachers who work there, the people entrusted with educating our children in the first place.

If you cant trust me to decide about bracelets and T-shirts, how can you possibly trust me to disseminate ideas?

As for our distinguished jurists, anybody who cant predict that many adolescents will have a disruptive, harassing field day with slogans that include reproductive organs and allied body parts shouldnt be in the position of deciding whats reasonable.

Once again your public schools have been rendered impotent.

Smirking vulgarity has triumphed in the name of free speech.

The courts and the general public will cluck their tongues at the further decline of public education.

Deal with it, Hemingway, theyll demand as they duck for cover.

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RTDNA Joins Free Press Groups in Tracking First Amendment Abuse – Broadcasting & Cable

Posted: at 9:56 am

Furthering its efforts around the First Amendment, the Radio Television Digital News Association has joined more than 20 organizations in launching the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a website dedicated to documenting abuses against journalists.

The tracker is a repository of data tracking incidents arrests of journalists, equipment searches and physical attacks among them at a time when journalists in the U.S. are facing increasing hostility, RTDNA said.

Reporters covering protests in Washington and North Dakota, for instance, are among 19 journalists charged with crimes so far this year. Ten are currently facing charges, RTDNA said.

Twelve journalists have been subject to equipment searches, and 10 have been physically attacked, the tracker shows.

The tracker shows data collected from news reports and submissions. The Columbia Journalist, Review, Investigative Reporters & Editors and Knight First Amendment Institute are among partnering organizations.

RTNDAs support of the tracker is part of the groups larger multi-faceted initiative fighting the range of threats, from limits to ugly rhetoric, that impede journalists from doing their jobs. The group launched a First Amendment task force earlier this year.

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Bitcoin cash is already the third most valuable cryptocurrency – Quartz

Posted: at 9:54 am

Bitcoin cash, the offshoot of cryptocurrency bitcoin that was created yesterday, is now worth $7.6 billion, according to data provider Coin Marketcap. That pegs the value of all the bitcoin cash in circulation at 17% of bitcoins total market value of $44.4 billion. This makes bitcoin cash the third most valuable cryptocurrency, behind bitcoin and ethereum. It trades under the BCH symbol on most exchanges, while bitcoin retains BTC.

Bitcoin cashs vault up the valuation charts can be explained by its provenance as a fork of bitcointhink of it like the splitting of an amoeba in two. The market value of all the coins in circulationusually referred to as the market cap in cryptocurrency jargonis calculated by multiplying a coins price by the total supply of coins in circulation. When bitcoin cash splintered off from bitcoin, it also inherited the supply of coins in circulation. In other words, there is roughly the same amount of bitcoin cash in circulation as bitcoin, and both cryptocurrencies each currently have 16.5 million units in circulation.

There are slightly more bitcoins in circulation than bitcoin casha difference of 474 coinsbecause when bitcoin cash forked, there was a period of several hours when no new bitcoin cash blocks were mined. In the meantime, bitcoin miners continued to find blocks, introducing new coins to the circulating supply.

A chain split is a slow and confusing event, even with a deadline. Bitcoin cash had a much publicized deadline of Aug 1, 12:20 UTC (or 8:20am US Eastern time) for the split to occur. Yet it wasnt until hours later that the split actually took place.

The reason for this confusing state of affairs is as much about semantics as technicalities. Firstly, the bitcoin cash software uses a particular calculation for time called median time past thats based not on clock time but on the number of blocks mined after the 12:20 deadline. Since there is an element of chance that determines when exactly a block is mined, experts could only estimate when the bitcoin cash software would kick in. In practice, this meant that the bitcoin cash software would only activate about an hour after 12:20 UTC, which was the case.

Once bitcoin cash was activated, the bitcoin cash blockchain stopped growing for several hours, while the bitcoin blockchain continued to add new blocks as normal. This activation happened at 12:37 UTC when both blockchains had just mined block number 478,558this would be the last common block shared between bitcoin and bitcoin cash. All future blocks would send the coins on their independent trajectories.

There was confusion as the bitcoin cash blockchain stalled at block 478,558. What would normally happen is that a new block would have been mined478,559in about 10 minutes. But as hours went by, it became clear that not enough miners were committing processing power to the new blockchain to discover a new block. This was because the new chain also inherited the difficulty threshold for finding a new block from the bitcoin blockchain, meaning a massive amount of processing power would be required.

At this stage, although the chains have split, the new chain didnt yet have any new blocks, so was technically simply a stalled version of the bitcoin blockchain. Most observers in the bitcoin world thought it would take hours, or even days, for miners to devote enough processing power to the bitcoin cash blockchain to discover a block.

But around six hours later, ViaBTC, a Chinese mining pool based in Shenzhen that has vocally supported bitcoin cash, added block number 478,559 to the bitcoin cash blockchain. This block was 1.9 megabytes in sizenearly double the maximum size allowed on the bitcoin blockchain. Compare this to the same block on the bitcoin blockchain, which coincidentally was also mined by ViaBTC, but was only 272 kilobytes in size. Subsequent blocks, however, have been well below 1 MB, reflecting the small number of transactions on the new blockchain.

Two metaphors from the traditional equity markets have been used to describe the creation of bitcoin cash: a stock split or a dividend. But there are good reasons to think that bitcoins split is not like a stock split at all, as this CoinDesk piece suggests. For starters, a stock split doesnt change the assets value; it simply adjusts the quantity and therefore price of the stock on the market. An increase in the number of stocks leads to a commensurate drop in price, without changing the fundamentals of the company in question.

Bitcoins fork doesnt split existing units of bitcoinin fact, the bitcoin price has remained more or less the same throughout (which could be seen as a bullish vote of confidence in the cryptocurrencys continued supremacy). Neither have any new units of bitcoin been created by the fork.

Instead, what happened is more like cloning. Thats because anyone who held bitcoin before the split would now also hold the equivalent amount of bitcoin cash. This makes the bitcoin fork more like a dividend: investors who held on to bitcoin and werent scared off by the fork were now credited with an equal amount of bitcoin cash.

A major cryptocurrency forking, and the market supporting both resulting coins, isnt as weird as it sounds. This already happened with ethereum in July 2016, when a philosophical disagreement among ethereum holders led to a hard fork, creating ethereum and ethereum classic.

Ethereum classic has gained influential backers, such as venture capitalist Barry Silbert. Ethereum classic is traded on a handful of major exchanges. It has a market value of $1.3 billion, or 6% of ethereums $21 billion. As ethereum went on a dizzying rally this year, so did ethereum classic, rising by 16-fold from the start of the year to a peak of nearly $22 per unit in June.

But ethereum classics rally was muted compared to ethereums 40-fold increase over the same period. Nevertheless, its price trades well below that of ethereum, with each unit of ethereum classic trading for just over 0.05 ether.

While the ethereum and bitcoin splits share some similarities such as a contentious dispute over the fundamentals of each protocol, bitcoins split is more significant. Whereas ethereum classic has maintained all the features of ethereum when it splitincluding preserving the transactions that allowed funds to be stolen from the Decentralized Autonomous Organization last summer, which was the root of the disagreementbitcoin cash has significant differences in its underlying programming.

Chief among them is an eight-fold increase in the block size limit, allowing bitcoin cash miners to handle eight-megabyte blocks compared to bitcoins one megabyte. Being able to handle more transactions helps bitcoin cash act more like a payment channel, which is what its proponents are advocating.

One way to get bitcoin cash is to buy it. Its now trading on several major exchanges (heres a list), with the bulk of trading volume taking place on Kraken and Bittrex, according to Crypto Compare.

The other way to get bitcoin cash is to claim it from any bitcoin holdings you owned before the fork. In theory, its simple: All private keysbasically the password to unlocking bitcoin holdingsare identical on both the bitcoin and bitcoin cash blockchains. This means you use the same private key to access funds on both chains. But in practice, this can be tricky.

The most reliable, though fiddly, method is to run a bitcoin cash full node. This is software that downloads the entire bitcoin cash blockchain , which is around 126 gigabytes, and also checks the validity of live transactions on the bitcoin cash network. Import the private keys from your existing bitcoin wallet to the wallet linked to the bitcoin cash full-node. You should then be able to access the new bitcoin cash funds. Check out the detailed instructions, and several other methods, including hardware wallets and paper wallets, in this Bitcoin Magazine piece.

Some exchanges also automatically credit pre-fork bitcoin holders with bitcoin cash. These include Kraken, Bittrex, and Bitfinex. This seems simple, but there can be several drawbacks. You must rely on the exchange to credit the new coins, which can be a slow process, and you may be unable to withdraw the new funds immediately, as Kraken users are currently experiencing.

Some exchanges also apply a discount to the amount of bitcoin cash thats credited, like Bitfinex, which offers 0.85 bitcoin cash for every bitcoin. The discount was applied because the exchange claimed customers were manipulating its peer-to-peer margin financing system to inflate the amount of bitcoin cash they would receive.

Bitcoin cash is now, for all intents and purposes, an asset independent of bitcoin. It must develop its own ecosystem of developers, exchanges, and startups in order to flourish.

Bitcoin cashs price will be an important indicator of its future potential. If it is indeed what bitcoin ought to bea payment system with a large transaction capacity, as its advocates arguethe market should value it above bitcoin at some point in the future.

Another important indicator will be the amount of hash rate or processing power that miners commit to bitcoin cash. There isnt a data source for the hashrate on the bitcoin cash network yet, but we know that miners are crunching 6.4 million terahashes per second on the bitcoin network. That consumes an estimated 15 terawatt hours of electricity a year, putting the bitcoin networks consumption between Turkmenistan and North Korea, if it were ranked with countries.

If miners abandon bitcoin cash because mining it turns out not to be profitable, then bitcoin cash could wither away. As one expert observer of the fork, Andrew Chow, who developed the widely watched BTC Fork Monitor, told me, if that happened, the new chain would simply be dead.

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Bitcoin cash is already the third most valuable cryptocurrency - Quartz

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Options Exchange CBOE to Launch Cryptocurrency Derivatives in … – CoinDesk

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The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) has partnered with Gemini, the bitcoin exchange backed by investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, as part of a bid to launch cryptocurrency derivatives trading.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the agreement will find the CBOE leveraging Gemini's data for the launch of dedicated product listings in 2017. Opened to traders in 2015, Gemini is a New York-based exchange offering bitcoin and ether markets, as well as daily auctions of the cryptocurrencies.

The CBOE is still waiting for regulatory approval on the move, the report said, which would provide institutional investors with an avenue to hedge against volatility in the fast-growing cryptocurrency markets. Already, the total value of all cryptocurrencies from just over $10 billion at the start of the year, to a high of $115 billion in June.

Further, the announcement comes at a time when institutional investors are increasingly taking note of this price appreciation, and are seeking to determine opportunities for the technology that fit into their existing business models.

Most notably, it follows a decision by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to grant a license to LedgerX last week that would allow it to clear and custody cryptocurrency derivatives for assets like bitcoin and ether.

Markets trading image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Have breaking news or a story tip to send to our journalists? Contact us at [emailprotected].

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What you need to know about cryptocurrency mining – PC Gamer

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Cryptocurrency news has been hot of late, thanks in no small part to the skyrocketing prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies right now. Litecoin and other cryptocurrencies are also up in value, and given the prices on graphics cards that are supposed to be useful for gaming, some of you will inevitably wonder: should I get into the mining business?

That's a big, open-ended question, and the answer depends on many factors. I'm not going to try and cover every aspect, because Google is your friend, but let's quickly go over the basics of what you would need to get started, and I'll include some rough estimates of how much money you can make at the end.

The core of mining is the idea of block rewards. For most coins, these are given to the person/group that finds a valid solution to the cryptographic hashing algorithm. This solution is a mathematical calculation that uses the results of previous block solutions, so there's no way to pre-calculate answers for a future block without knowing the solution to the previous block. This history of block solutions and transactions constitutes the blockchain, a sort of public ledger.

What is a block, though? A single block contains cryptographic signatures for the block and the transactions within the block. The transactions are collected from the network, typically with a small fee attached, which also becomes part of the block reward. There's a difficulty value attached to the solution for a block as well, which can scale up/down over time, the goal being to keep the rate of generation of new blocks relatively constant.

For Bitcoin, the target is to generate a block solution every 10 minutes on average. For Ethereum, block solutions should come every 16 seconds. That's obviously a huge difference in approach, and the shorter block time is one reason some people favor Ethereum (though there are others I won't get into). Simplistically, the number solution has to be less than some value, and with 256-bit numbers that gives a huge range of possibilities. The solution includes the wallet address for the solving system, which then receives all the transaction fees along with the block reward, and the block gets written to the blockchain of all participating systems.

Think of it as panning for gold in a streamyou might get lucky and find a huge gold nugget, you might end up with lots of flakes of dust, or you might find nothing. If the stream is in a good location, you make money more quickly. The difference is that with cryptocurrencies, the 'good location' aspect is replaced by 'good hardware.'

There are many options for cryptocurrency mining. Some algorithms can still be run more or less 'effectively' on CPUs (eg, Cryptonight), others work best on GPUs (Ethereum, Zcash, Vertcoin), and still others are the domain of custom ASICs (Bitcoin, Litecoin). But besides having the hardware, there are other steps to take to get started with mining.

In the early days of Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies, you could effectively solo-mine the algorithms. That meant downloading (or even compiling) the wallet for a particular coin and the correct mining software. Then configure the mining software to join the cryptocurrency network of your choosing, and dedicate your CPU/GPU/ASIC to the task of running calculations. The hope was to find a valid block solution before anyone else. Each time a block is found, the calculations restart, so having hardware that can search potential solutions more quickly is beneficial.

These days, a lot of people forego running the wallet software. It takes up disk space, network bandwidth, and isn't even required for mining. Just downloading the full Bitcoin blockchain currently requires over 45GB of disk space, and it can take a while to get synced up. There are websites that take care of that part of things, assuming you trust the host.

In theory, over time the law of averages comes into play. If you provide one percent of the total computational power for a coin, you should typically find one percent of all blocks. But as Bitcoin and its descendants increased in popularity, difficulty shot up, and eventually solo-mining became an impractical endeavor. When you're only able to provide 0.00001 percent of the mining power, and that value keeps decreasing over time, your chance of finding a valid block solution becomes effectively zero. Enter the mining pools.

If solo mining is like solo gaming in an MMO, block rewards have become the domain of large mining guilds, called mining pools. For blockchain security reasons, you don't want any single groupa mining pool or an individualto control more than 50 percent of the computational power (hashrate) for the coin network, but for mining purposes, being in a bigger pool is almost always better.

The reason is that, unlike block rewards where everything goes to the winning system, mining pools work together and distribute the rewards among all participants, usually based on a percentage of the mining pool hashrate. Your hardware gets smaller portions of work from the pool, and submits those as shares of work. Even if you only contribute 0.00001 percent of the hashrate, you still get that percentage of every block the pool solves.

To give a specific example, suppose a coin has a total network hashrate of 1Phash/s (peta-hash), but you only provide 0.1Ghash/s. Your chance of mining a block solo is about as good as your chance of winning the lottery. If you join a pool that does 25 percent of the network hashrate, the pool should find 25 percent of blocks, and you'll end up with 0.00004 percent of the block rewards. If a block is worth 50 coins, that's 0.0002 coins from each block the pool findsoften minus a small (1-3) percentage for the pool operators. That might sound like a pittance, but when coins are worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, it can add up quickly.

There are many places that will provide calculators for cryptocurrencies, so you can see how much you could potentially earn from mining. But ultimately, you'll want to join a mining pool. As a side note, I'd recommend using a new email address for such purposes, and then I'd create a unique password for every pool you happen to joinbecause cryptocurrency thefts are far too common if you're lax with passwords. #experience

If you want to actually collect a coin, like Ethereum, you'll need to take the additional steps of downloading the Ethereum client, syncing up to the blockchain, and setting up the mining pool to pay out to your wallet. It's possible to have pools deposit directly to a wallet address at a cryptocurrency exchange, but again, there are risks there and long-term I wouldn't recommend storing things on someone else's servers/drives.

If all this sounds time consuming, it can beand the people who are really into cryptocurrency often do this as a full-time job. And the real money often ends up in the hands of the pool operators and exchanges, but I digress.

You've got your hardware, you've joined a mining pool, and you're ready to rock the cryptocurrency world. All that's needed now is to download the appropriate software, give it the correct settings for your hardware and the pool, and then away you go. Sort of.

Most pools will provide basic instructions on how to get set up for mining, including where to download the software. But all software isn't created equal, and even things like drivers, firmware revisions, and memory clockspeeds can affect your mining speed. So if you're serious about mining, get friendly with scouring places like Bitcointalk, Github, and other forums.

The easiest way to mine a coin is to just point all your mining rigs at the appropriate pool and load up the necessary software. The problem is that the 'best' coin for mining is often a fleeting, ethereal thingEthereum's real value came because other market forces pushed it from $5-$10 per ETH up to $200+ per ETH during the past several months. Prior to that, it was only one of many coins that were potentially profitable to mine. But switching between coins can take a lot of time, so there's other software that will help offload some of that complexity.

One popular solution is Nicehash, which will lease hashing power to others that will pay for it in Bitcoin. In effect, it transfers the job of figuring out which coin/algorithm to mine to others, though again there are fees involved and the going rates on Nicehash are lower than mining coins directly. The benefit is that you don't end up holding a bunch of some coin that has become worthless.

A more complex solution is to set up multi-algorithm mining software on your own. To do this, you would typically have accounts for all the coins you're interested in mining, and then create rules to determine which coin is best at any given time. Sites like WhatToMine can help figure out what the currently best paying option is, but naturally others would be seeing the same data.

The thing you need to know with cryptocurrency mining is that beyond the initial cost of the hardware, power and hardware longevity are ongoing concerns. The lower your power costs, the easier it is to make mining a profitable endeavor. Conversely, if you live in an area with relatively expensive power costs, mining can seem like a terrible idea.

When many people think about cryptocurrency mining, the first thought is to look at Bitcoin itself. Now the domain of custom ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), Bitcoin isn't worth mining using GPUs. Where a fast CPU can do perhaps 40MH/s and a good GPU might even hit 1GH/s or more, the fastest ASICs like the Antminer S9 can do 14TH/s. But the Antminer S9 costs $2,100 or more, and still uses around 1350W of power (so you need to add your own 1500W PSU)and you'll net about $8 per day.

Can you do better with mining using graphics cards? As you might have guessed given the current prices of RX 570/580 and GTX 1060/1070, the answer is yes, though not necessarily at the currently inflated GPU prices. But let's start with a basic system cost. You'll need a cheap CPU, motherboard with six PCIe slots, 4GB DDR4 RAM (maybe 8GB if you want), budget hard drive, six PCIe riser adapters, and 1350W 80 Plus Platinum PSU. For the case, you're usually best off building a mining rig using wire shelving and zip ties or something similar. Add all of that up and it will cost around $560 (with 4GB RAM).

The sticking point is the graphics cards. If you could buy RX 580 at the original MSRP of $230 for the 8GB card, $200 for the 4GB model, or $170 each for the RX 570 4GByeah, those are the actual launch prices!that would be $1,380, $1,200, or $1,020. With prices skyrocketing on the RX cards, GTX 1070 became the next logical target, with prices increasing from $350 per 1070 a few months ago to $450+ per card today.

I've got good news for gamers, as I've put together a table showing expected returns using various forms of mining, using current graphics card and ASIC prices. Some of these (like the Antminer L3+) are difficult to find or are still pre-order, but you can sometimes pay a significantly higher price to get one. Here's what things currently look like:

Is there still money to be made as a cryptocurrency miner? I think a lot of this goes back to what happened with Ethereum this past year, with the value going from under $10 per ETH to a peak of nearly $400 per ETH. Selling all the coins you mine can earn money, but if you had the foresight to mine and hold ETH and sold near the peak value, you literally just hit the jackpot. Or if you prefer mining slang, you hit the motherload.

Ethereum prices have since dropped down to $200 (give or take), but there's this hope that eventually another bubble will occur, driving prices up into the thousands of dollars per ETH. Sound like fantasy land? Tell that to all the Bitcoin miners and investors who got in for hundreds of dollars. But without a price spikeand with the potential for the price to drop instead of going upthe above table is something of an optimistic view of the cryptocurrency market.

Price volatility combined with increasing difficulty could radically change things over the span of months. Instead of 200-400 days to recover your hardware investment, it might take several years. Or it could go the other way and take 3-6 months. I wouldn't count on most GPUs surviving 24/7 mining for several years, however.

The bottom line is that at current GPU prices, which remain supply constrained, it's no longer a 'safe' investment to put tons of money into new mining rigs. So the bubble has burst and things should be settling down again.

Perhaps even better (for gamers), early estimates of mining performance using the Vega Frontier Edition suggest it won't be substantially faster than current AMD cards, and with higher power draw it won't be particularly attractive either. But be warned that software optimizations could shake things up. If someone figures out a way to get twice the performance out of a Vega card, it could become the new mining wunderkind.

Should you quit gaming and start mining, then? I wouldn't recommend itbecause if you haven't gotten started already, you're already behind the bubble and will may end up taking a loss. Besides, playing games is more fun, and doesn't serve to heat up your office. That unfortunately won't stop miners from continuing to buy graphics cards, so long as they see a potential profit in it.

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What you need to know about cryptocurrency mining - PC Gamer

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