At first this didn’t make sense but the title is less informative. It’s private Facebook posts.
These Facebook messages are going to someone. If the person on the other line is willing to reveal their account to law enforcement, then wiretap should not be needed.
And if a Facebook post is to a private group of all your friends then only if the other people reveal your post, should law enforcement be able to access this. Or if there is a wiretap.
> If the person on the other line is willing to reveal their account to law enforcement, then wiretap should not be needed.
If Facebook posts count as telephony, then this varies by state. One-party consent vs two-party consent. If you dial up Bob and Bob agrees to let the police listen in, that still requires judicial approval in California. (To use as evidence in prosecution, anyways.)
On the other hand if they don't fall into the specific legal definition of what's covered by wiretapping, then they fall into the Third Part Doctrine. Which means that what you're saying applies: you gave your information to another party, you're at their whims of whether that data gets revealed.
The linked article is making a strong distinction about wiretapping specifically and the protections around it, from which I infer that everyone agrees facebook messages are legally phone calls, for whatever reason.
Are these specifically private posts/conversations? It seems like a logical decision for private stuff but if you're dumb enough to set your post settings to public and incriminate yourself then you have no one to blame but yourself.
> The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that law enforcement must obtain a wiretap to force near-simultaneous disclosure of private social media postings
I don't think you're correct to limit it to just DMs, as a private group on Facebook would - to me - be conceptually similar to a clubhouse (or hell even a "business" as MLMs on FB are called :D) or some such. You don't lose the warrant requirement just because it's a group of people vs just 1:1.
I think there was a post on here a while back about people calling Facebook and impersonating the police department saying there is a threat to life, like a kid was kidnapped or something, and getting access to spouses/coworkers/enemies facebook messages. Might at least make that harder to do.
A private group is not the same as DMs on a privacy level, though. Two can keep a secret, not more. I distinctly remember reading about cops socially engineering their way into protest chats in Hong Kong, because when it's a big group of people, it's easier to say "oh yeah, I'm a friend of John's" and get away with it.
What you're saying is akin to "a conversation in a private clubhouse doesn't have the same privacy as a conversation in a bedroom" which is true, but that does not matter.
Yes, having more people involved means a greater chance of someone simply talking to the police, but the same applies to a single person you had a conversation with in your bedroom. You do not have any legal protection against a person you talked to telling the police/government what you said (with the exception of _very_ specific set of explicitly enumerated cases), regardless of how many people were present.
But we are not talking about people voluntarily talking to the police, we're talking about secret police surveillance of a private group. What the police were asking is "can we put bugs in a private clubroom/union hall/church without a warrant?".
Also, including what china did in HK in a conversation about rule of law, human rights, etc is simply not relevant by _any_ definition.
We're literally discussing an article in which a court said you need a warrant to surveil people in a group chat, and you're saying their is not a significant gap between that and china (where there is consistent pervasive surveillance of all communication at all times)?
> Are these specifically private posts/conversations?
IANAL but I think that wasn't questioned/decided yet. Rather the ruling hinged on a question about timing/freshness, and whether the police had to use one legal standard versus another.
The state argued that getting a feed on a 15-minute delay made it a request for "stored communication" held by Facebook (subject to lesser requirements) rather than live surveillance... and the court rightly rejected that reasoning as specious.
Interesting ruling. I hope this goes to SCOTUS, since there hasn't been a clear distinction (that I'm aware of) for what constitutes a "public square" for communication, and this could indirectly affect a number of other legal issues surrounding social media.
Do I think cops should get a warrant before dragnetting your social media posts? Yeah, sure, I like that idea. Do I also think you are an idiot if you post public with no privacy settings? You bet your ass I do.
These Facebook messages are going to someone. If the person on the other line is willing to reveal their account to law enforcement, then wiretap should not be needed.
And if a Facebook post is to a private group of all your friends then only if the other people reveal your post, should law enforcement be able to access this. Or if there is a wiretap.
This is rationality restored. Finally.