When it comes to the sky, there is no privacy. There hasn't been, really, since 1989, when the Supreme Court ruled in Florida v. Riley that a helicopter flying above 400 feet didn't need a warrant for what it saw from above.
The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to issue a temporary stay on President Obama's Clean Power Plan. The move blocks the plan's implementation until a lower court can hear objections to the plan in June.
For many of us, our smartphones are an integral part of our being, containing not just everything we need to communicate but depths of personal information, from our daily schedules to our finances. While last summer the Supreme Court ruled cell phone information is private and therefore protected, that's irrelevant to anyone trying to steal the sensitive bits stored on one. As Rose Eveleth reports for BBC Future, Seth Wahle, an engineer and biohacker, demonstrated that it's possible to steal information off of a phone with a microchip embedded in his hand.
Last month, online television company Aereo lost in a major case before the Supreme Court. The Court's 6-3 decision in ABC v. Aereo treated the company, and its unique antenna arrays, as just another cable network. In court documents filed yesterday, Aereo argues that it's allowed to keep operating. Only this time, Aereo will explicitly be a cable company.
Yesterday, in a 6-3 decision by the US Supreme Court in ABC v. Aereo, the government ruled that Aereo's streaming of cable TV over the web is illegal. In the process, the Supreme Court majority showed its confusion over how the internet works—and technology in general—and put forth a strange interpretation of the term "public performance."
This morning the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a unanimous 9-0 decision on Riley v. California that police cannot, with few exceptions, search a cell phone without a warrant to do so. The whole opinion is structured as a critique of warrantless data collection, based on norms that precede cell phones, and much of the case delves into just how different 16 gigabytes of information on a phone is from pictures in a wallet or a handwritten book of phone numbers.
Louisiana may soon repeal an act, put in place in 1981, that required public schools to teach creationism alongside evolution. But it's not as if the act has necessarily been in, uh, action since then. A few years after its passage, the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Actunderwent several legal challenges. In 1987, it went to the Supreme Court, which ruled it unconstitutional because it "endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind."
