NV - Officials push to amend Nevada’s controversial sex offender law

Original Article

05/01/2014

By YESENIA AMARO

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore on Thursday said she would use one of her bill drafts in the next legislative session to rework the state’s controversial sex offender law that was adopted to comply with a federal act.

In 2006, Congress approved the Adam Walsh Act as a guideline for state laws on sex crimes. The act was intended to toughen punishment for sex offenders and make their photos, names and addresses available to the general public.
- Once again we have someone admitting the laws are all about punishment, therefore they are unconstitutional!

Nevada lawmakers in 2007 adopted most provisions of the federal law. The state law, proposed in Assembly Bill 579, was set to go into effect Feb. 1, but the Nevada Supreme Court put a temporary stop to it following a lawsuit filed on behalf of 24 unnamed clients.

It was not the first legal challenge the law had faced since 2007.

“I just don’t think that AB579 is fitting nor (is) appropriate for the state of Nevada,” Fiore, R-Las Vegas, said during a meeting of the Advisory Committee to Study Laws Concerning Sex Offender Registration. “I really, truly believe that we have very intelligent legislators and judges, that could bring forth this next legislative session much more comprehensive guidelines than what’s implemented in this” legislation.

The state law applies to anyone convicted of a felony sex crime involving children and is retroactive to 1956. There are about 3,000 registered sex offenders in Nevada, and that number is expected to dramatically increase under the law.

Susan Roske, an attorney with Clark County’s juvenile public defender’s office, said if the committee doesn’t make a recommendation to the Legislature to repeal the law entirely, an alternative could be to amend parts of the law that address juveniles.

In response to various states concerned about the federal act’s impact on juvenile offenders, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking has said juvenile courts can have discretion in keeping juvenile offenders off the public website that would display their personal information, Roske said.

The committee could ask the state Legislature to acknowledge those changes and grant juvenile court judges that discretion, she said. The change wouldn’t apply to juveniles being charged as adults.

“I would strongly urge that this change be made,” she said Thursday.

Tod Story, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said he would recommend the state suspend the implementation of the law and examine why lawmakers rushed to adopt it in 2007.

Thus far, only 17 states have passed laws which “substantially implement” the federal act, Story said. The remaining 33 states are either unable or unwilling to comply with the requirements.

“It’s a bad law and it wasn’t thought through,” Roske said.

DOJ Pushes to Expand Hacking Abilities Against Cyber-Criminals

Original Article

03/27/2014

By JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES

The U.S. Department of Justice is pushing to make it easier for law enforcement to get warrants to hack into the computers of criminal suspects across the country.

The move, which would alter federal court rules governing search warrants, comes amid increases in cases related to computer crimes.

Investigators say they need more flexibility to get warrants to allow hacking in such cases, especially when multiple computers are involved or the government doesn’t know where the suspect’s computer is physically located.

The Justice Department effort is raising questions among some technology advocates, who say the government should focus on fixing the holes in computer software that allow such hacking instead of exploiting them. Privacy advocates also warn government spyware could end up on innocent people’s computers if remote attacks are authorized against equipment whose ownership isn’t clear.

The Justice Department declined to provide further comment beyond the original documents.

The government’s push for rule changes sheds light on law enforcement’s use of remote hacking techniques, which are being deployed more frequently but have been protected behind a veil of secrecy for years.

In documents submitted by the government to the judicial system’s rule-making body this year, the government discussed using software to find suspected child pornographers who visited a U.S. site and concealed their identity using a strong anonymization tool called Tor.

The government’s hacking tools—such as sending an email embedded with code that installs spying software — resemble those used by criminal hackers. The government doesn’t describe these methods as hacking, preferring instead to use terms like “remote access” and “network investigative techniques.”

Right now, investigators who want to search property, including computers, generally need to get a warrant from a judge in the district where the property is located, according to federal court rules.

In a computer investigation, that might not be possible, because criminals can hide behind anonymizing technologies. In cases involving botnets—groups of hijacked computers—investigators might also want to search many machines at once without getting that many warrants.

Some judges have already granted warrants in cases when authorities don’t know where the machine is. But at least one judge has denied an application in part because of the current rules. The department also wants warrants to be allowed for multiple computers at the same time, as well as for searches of many related storage, email and social media accounts at once, as long as those accounts are accessed by the computer being searched.

“Remote searches of computers are often essential to the successful investigation” of computer crimes, Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman wrote in a letter to the judicial system’s rulemaking authority requesting the change in September. The government tries to obtain these “remote access warrants” mainly to “combat Internet anonymizing techniques,” the department said in a memo to the authority in March.

Some groups have raised questions about law enforcement’s use of hacking technologies, arguing that such tools mean the government is failing to help fix software problems exploited by criminals.

“It is crucial that we have a robust public debate about how the Fourth Amendment and federal law should limit the government’s use of malware and spyware within the U.S.,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on technology issues.

A Texas judge who denied a warrant application last year cited privacy concerns associated with sending malware when the location of the computer wasn’t known. He pointed out that a suspect opening an email infected with spyware could be doing so on a public computer, creating risk of information being collected from innocent people.

A former computer crimes prosecutor serving on an advisory committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference, which is reviewing the request, said he was concerned that allowing the search of multiple computers under a single warrant would violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against overly broad searches.

The proposed rule is set to be debated by the Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules in early April, after which it would be opened to public comment.