NJ Supreme Court Rules For Internet Privacy

dprovine writes "The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that ISPs can't release customer information without a warrant. The unanimous decision reads in part 'We now hold that citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy protected by Article I ... of the New Jersey Constitution, in the subscriber information they provide to Internet service providers — just as New Jersey citizens have a privacy interest in their bank records stored by banks and telephone billing records kept by phone companies.'"

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This won't just effect people from NJ

[ConfrontationalGrayh]

AT&T's main NOC is in NJ. This is the NOC that handles most of their T1 traffic and troubles. They also have a smaller one in Kentucky, but the main one is in New Jersey.

Re:Precedence in US Vs Forrester

[andb52]

Even if there is an apparent conflict between the two rulings, such a contradiction will not necessarily be referred to the US Supreme Court. Remember, the New Jersey ruling was under the New Jersey Constitution, which provides far more rights to citizens than the United States Constitution. As such, even if there is not federal right to privacy with one's ISP, there still could be a right to privacy within the state of New Jersey.

Re:Precedence in US Vs Forrester

[tinkerghost]

And that is exactly the kind of conflict that will bring it to the Supremes. The Feds will try to get information without a warrant and the conflict will ensue.

Not really, State & Federal courts really move in different circles. The Feds will get info without the warrant & none of the proceeds will be usable for any ancillary state charges, but it won't affect the federal case.

The interesting thing to me is that the court ruled that the problem was with the type of seupona used. Per the article, the cops went & got one from a judge, but the court ruled that they needed to go to a grand jury instead. That seems a bit odd to me, it was my understanding that the GJ was usually brought in after most of the investigation was done, not at the beginning.

What about federal interference.

[moxley]

This is great until the Feds come in and unconstitutionally trump that like they do whenever they wis to step all over state law.

Re:great news for thieves

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Yeah, they're all in it together for the money.

Or maybe money (or lack thereof) is the reason they can't be bothered investigating every singe one of the 14,000 warrants. Maybe even only about 5 (or 10 or 15) were actually bad warrants, and the rest were perfectly legal and perfectly justifiable.

So, we have two possibilities: a) the government is cohesive, efficient, greedy, corrupt, ruthless, or b) the government is slow, inefficient, under-funded (at least, if you want every warrant triple checked by every layer of authority), and lazy.

I'm betting on b), based on previous encounters with governments and their employees. The separation of powers would also explain the inefficiency, which would in turn explain the low warrant rejection rate. Or I could be wrong, and it could be a) the evil plutocrats wanting quick arrests for some god-knows reason.

Re:Precedence in US Vs Forrester

[moeinvt]

"The Feds will try to get information without a warrant and the conflict will ensue."

I've been waiting to see this type of conflict. I'm surprised that it would happen in New Jersey, but many states have their own Constitutions which define the Rights of their citizens even more broadly than what's in the U.S. Constitution. IANAL, but if I have certain Rights under my State Constitution, the fact that the same Rights are not specifically elaborated in the U.S. Constitution shouldn't mean that agents of the Federal government are free to trample on them.

It would be great if New Jersey had some guts and empowered the NJ State Police to arrest Federal agents for the crime of illegally spying on NJ residents.