The Department of Justice is suspending a program allowing local police departments to keep a large portion of assets seized under federal law, the Department announced December 21.
This “equitable sharing” program has allowed liquidated assets seized in asset forfeiture cases to be shared between state and federal law enforcement authorities with local agencies receiving…
Early in 2015, the FBI launched a new program aimed at routing out foreign bribery in which it established three dedicated international corruption squads, based in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. The FBI reported that members of these three squads—agents, analysts, and other professional staff—have a great deal of experience investigating white-collar…
Whether the government can freeze all of a defendant’s assets before trial, even where those assets are not tainted by any connection to alleged federal offenses, thereby preventing a defendant from paying for his own defense, will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in Luis v. United States, No. 14-419.
The federal Mandatory…
During a cellphone call, the cellphone interacts with its mobile carrier, allowing the carrier to track that phone’s approximate location, also known as cell-site location information or “CSLI.” CSLI is saved on the carrier’s computer system. Prosecutors can obtain this CSLI, often without a warrant, to place defendants at crime scenes by tracing movements of…
Sensitive employer information may be the subject of secret Government prying. With the pervasive use of smart phones in business today, and with those phones containing confidential personal and business information, law enforcement has the ability to take information from those smart phones without an employer’s knowledge.
Most law-enforcement agencies have the ability to deploy…
“[T]he government’s warrantless procurement of the CSLI [cell-site location information] was an unreasonable search in violation of Appellants’ Fourth Amendment Rights,” a divided panel of the federal appeals court in Richmond has held, in conflict with its sister circuits, in a case where CSLI helped the prosecution establish the suspects’ location before and after robberies…
When federal agents execute a warrant for paper documents during an investigation of a company, they generally seize only the documents in the warrant and leave the rest of the physical documents behind. Where it is not practical to search on site, the law permits them to take all the records and review them later.…
Companies and other private parties acting on their own are not regulated by the Fourth Amendment’s restriction on search and seizure. A company can reconstruct a prior computer search for the government, without implicating the Fourth Amendment, to show the police what the company observed on the device. However, if the government asks the company…
The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules has voted 11-1 to modify Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to greatly expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s authority to obtain electronic information from a private computer.
Currently, judges can only approve search warrants for materials within their own judicial district. With this…
With the pervasive use of smart phones in business and with those phones often containing confidential personal and business information, employers should be aware that law enforcement may not only conduct a warrantless search of that information, but also may take that information without the public even knowing it has that ability.
In January 2015,…
