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Although it was somewhat of a secondary issue, there was an interesting decision this week from the South Dakota Supreme Court. It held that a person has no privacy interest in their IP address, at least for purposes of the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
To begin with, an IP address is the address your internet service provider (ISP) assigns your account on its network for internet access. An ISP can determine to what particular account any specific IP adress was assigned at a particular time. That is all an IP address does, though. It does not identify the device being used or who may be using that device. It could even be your neighbor or someone else “borrowing” your wireless access.
In the Supreme Court decision, the Pennington County Sheriff’s Department used software to determine a specific IP address that made child pornography available for downloading via LimeWire. It then issued a subpoena to Midcontinent Communications, the ISP that assigned the IP address, requesting the email address and personal information of the subscriber to whom it was assigned at the relevant times. (Subscribers rarely have a “static” IP address. Instead, a new address is assigned at specific intervals or as a result of specific events, such as restarting a modem or router.)
In response to the subpoena, Midcontinent provided the address, phone number and email address of the subscriber, John Rolfe of Rapid City. After obtaining a search warrant, authorities found child pornography involving the 12-year-old daughter of Rolfe’s son’s live-in girlfriend on a laptop in Rolfe’s bedroom. The girl told investigators Rolfe had drugged, sexually assaulted, and photographed her over several years. Rolfe was charged with and convicted of three counts of first-degree rape of a minor and 12 counts of possessing, manufacturing, or distributing child pornography.
At trial and on appeal Rolfe contended authorities couldn’t issue a subpoena for his account information before he was indicted. Both the trial court and the Supreme Court disagreed. South Dakota has no statutes in this area. As a result, the courts relied on existing Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. They said Rolfe could not even challenge the subpoena because a person must have a privacy interest in the material sought to invoke the guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. The Supreme Court reasoned that because Rolfe provided his contact information to Midcontinent, he had “no legitimate expectation of privacy” in it.
Regardless of one’s individual views of whether we should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such information, the Court probably reached the right result under the law. In fact, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act requires ISPs to provide certain information about a subscriber, including name, address and IP address to a subpoena issued by federal prosecutors.
… there is no violation of a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights when a third party internet provider receives a subpoena and discloses the defendant’s subscriber information.
State v. Rolfe, 2013 SD 2
Yes, Russia is a broad topic but it’s true. Entirely by coincidence both books I’m reading right now deal solely with Russian history.
 A couple months ago I saw Martin Sixsmith’s Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East on the shelves at the local B&N. Although I remain doubtful anyone can really tell a good history of the country in about 600 pages, the reviews it got upon its release in the U.K. were fairly impressive. As a result, it ended up on my Christmas wish list and, thanks to my middle daughter, under the tree.
 I started reading it just before New Year’s. I wasn’t 100 pages in when I got a notice from the library that a book I’d placed on reserve, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith, was available. Not wanting to wait any longer for it, I checked it out and also began reading it.
Normally, I wouldn’t read two books at the same time dealing with the same subject. Even though, so far, both books are very well done, my experience tends to support the inclination to avoid a similar situation in the future. Naturally, Sixsmith’s book covers a lot of ground. Peter the Great, for example, is covered in one chapter. In contrast, Smith’s book takes a detailed look at Russian aristocracy in the first half of the 20th Century. Perhaps it is because I am fickle or naturally curmudgeonly but the extremes don’t really make for a well-balanced reading experience. When I’m reading Russia I’m wishing for more detail. And, of course, when I’m reading Former People, I tend to wish for less detail.
I simply need to invoke the mantra I adopted last year: It is what it is.
In Russia, people suffer from the stillness of time.
Tatyana Tolstaya, May 1990
I don’t do resolutions and I’ve pretty much given up on reading challenges. But I did come up with a couple projects for the year over the holidays.
One has to do with the perpetual “to read” stacks in various parts of the house. As part of some changes in our bedroom, I moved in a much bigger bookshelf than I had in there before. My goal is to make that the official “to read” bookshelf. I hope that by centralizing them, it may lead me to follow through on past intentions of making sure I try and read one of those books before I get a new book. I don’t know if it will succeed but at least all of them will be in one location.
The other I could have accomplished in other fashions but opted for a way that called for a new “toy”. Two things came together for this. First, I have a CD case I guess contains at least 400 jazz CDs. (I am defining jazz a bit loosely as the CDs include some “New Age’ pianists and guitarists and a bit of so-called smooth jazz.) Meanwhile, I have a pair of JBL L-100 Century speakers. Although the foam grilles disintegrated, I remain of the opinion that these are among the finest home audio speakers ever manufactured.
Putting the two together, I told my wife she could get me a 300-disc CD changer for Christmas, which she did. I am filling the changer only with CDs from the jazz rack. Using a random number generator, my goal is to listen to every one of those 300 CDs over the course of the year. Best of all, both are in the room off our bedroom that has four huge built-in bookshelves and my home PC. I have now named it “the jazz room.”
There will be some exceptions to its jazz only rule. My kids bought me a turntable for Christmas with a USB connection and software so that I can easily convert vinyl to CD. Thus, I am also going to be revisiting my several hundred LP vinyl collection and create digital versions of albums I haven;t yet found on CD.
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
Frank Zappa, “Be-Bop Tango,” Roxy & Elsewhere
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead (“All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.”)
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Expectations can block the light.
Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace
It was an amazing year for reading, which I attribute not only to our “empty nest” but that I stayed with my nonresolution to read what I want when I wanted. I read only 19 review copies this year, compared to 36 last year. Ultimately, I read far more books this year than ever before.
I read more than 51,000 pages last year. My personal reading in 2012 also reflected what is happening in society. Nearly half the books I read were ebooks, an increase of more than 300 percent since 2010 and up nearly 40 percent over last year.
I read slightly more fiction percentage-wise. That resulted from increases in both translated literature and SF. As for nonfiction, people’s lives apparently intrigued me in 2012. Nearly half the nonfiction I read in 2012 were autobiographies, memoirs or biographies. Here’s a breakdown of how the year shaped up:
Books Read: 162
Pages Read: 51,040
Fiction: 87 (53.7 percent)
- Translated Works: 27 (25 fiction — 29 percent of the fiction– and two nonfiction)
- Languages: French (6), German (5), Russian (3), Spanish (3), Arabic (2), Finnish (2), Albanian (1), Chinese (1), Dutch (1), Korean (1), Norwegian (1), Various (1)
- Science Fiction: 20
- Short Stories: 8 (includes translated works and SF)
Non-fiction: 75 (46.3 percent)
- Autobiography/Memoirs/: 23 (19.4 percent of nonfiction)
- Biography: 13
- History: 12
Ebooks Read: 76 (47 percent)
Library materials: 56 (34.5 percent) (includes ebooks)
The presence of books in my hands, my home, my pockets, my life will never cease to be essential to my happiness.
Joe Queenan, One for the Books
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