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In a 4-to-3 ruling, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that the State Police violated a criminal suspect's rights under the State Constitution when it placed a GPS tracking device inside the bumper of his van without obtaining a warrant. The police had used the device to monitor the movements of the suspect, Scott C. Weaver, for more than two months. But the court ordered the evidence gathered from the device suppressed and ordered a new trial for Mr. Weaver. In three written opinions, the judges on the court debated the constitutional issues raised by the growing use of global positioning system technology as a tool of surveillance. The case could set an important precedent for state and local police agencies.

A surprise legal maneuver by the defense in the Sarah Palin hacking case could undermine key charges carrying the stiffest potential penalties. A lawyer for the Tennessee college student charged with hacking into the Alaska governor's Yahoo e-mail account last year says his client couldn't have violated Palin's privacy because a judge had already declared her e-mails a matter of public record. "He's not suggesting that e-mail can't be private," says Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department cybercrime prosecutor. "He's saying this particular e-mail was not private or personal because of who she is and because it wasn't intimate communication. " Additionally, photos that 20-year-old David Kernell allegedly obtained of Palin and her family were not private since the Palins are "the subjects of untold numbers of photo-ops," the lawyer argued last week, in one of a slew of motions and memorandums attacking the government's four-count federal indictment against Kernell.

Creative lawyer. The kid is still stupid. To me, It says more that Palin didn't get in trouble for using a public web mail account for State business. The kid who reads her email is on trial? What a country.

LifeLock Inc., the identity-theft protection company that boasts 1.5 million customers, is embroiled in legal battles with critics who say its key service breaks the law and its advertising defrauds consumers. A federal judge has ruled that the Tempe-based company's practice of setting fraud alerts for consumers with the three main credit bureaus - a major part of its $10-a-month service - is illegal. LifeLock filed a motion challenging the decision. If the court sides with LifeLock's opponents, the decision could stunt the growth of one of the shining stars of Arizona's startup community, forcing the company to permanently alter its practices.

A Troy woman learned Tuesday that she will spend 180 days in the Livingston County Jail for stealing the identity of a local woman who was dying. Judge Stanley J. Latreille also sentenced Vershawn Jones, who earlier pleaded guilty to identity theft, to four years of probation. Assistant Prosecutor Pamela Maas said the victim, who was not in court Tuesday, wanted to know how Jones, 38, got his wife's identification. His wife, Maas noted, was dying in a Hospice facility at the time. Jones, who said she operated a mortgage business, said she got it from one of four employees who brought her applications from people seeking mortgages. Those applications included personal information, such as Social Security numbers, she said. When pressed for names, Jones glanced at her attorney and shrugged. "I apologize to the victim and the victim's family," she said. "I've done the best I can running my own business." Maas initially requested that the state be allowed to withdraw from the plea deal that called for her office to recommend Jones serve no more than 90 days in the county jail after noting Jones had twice been sent to jail for failing to show for court hearings. While Jones apologized, Latreille was unmoved, telling the defendant "you're fortunate you're not going to prison."

On January 7, backers of California's Proposition 8 filed a federal lawsuit, asking that they be exempted from complying with California election laws that require disclosure of the names of people who give as much as $100 to a campaign for or against an initiative. The case is ProtectMarriage.com v Bowen, no. 2:09-cv-00058 (Sacramento). It was assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Morrison England, who was appointed in 2002. The case depends on the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court precedent Brown v Socialist Workers '74 Campaign Committee, which said that disclosure is not compelled if there is a reasonable possibility that campaign contributors, if identified, will be subject to harassment. Besides the Socialist Workers Party, other groups that have won freedom from disclosure include the Freedom Socialist Party, Socialist Action, and the Communist Party.

"Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email. But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically. Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else's personal and financial information is easier than ever. "Courts are more inclined to rule based on arguments presented to them that privacy issues need to be carefully considered," said Katharine Parker, a lawyer at Proskauer Rose who specializes in employment issues. In past years, courts showed sympathy for corporations that monitored personal email accounts accessed over corporate computer networks. Generally, judges treated corporate computers, and anything on them, as company property. Now, courts are increasingly taking into account whether employers have explicitly described how email is monitored to their employees."

"Two L.A. traffic engineers who pleaded guilty to hacking into the city's signal system and slowing traffic at key intersections as part of a labor protest have been sentenced to two years' probation. Authorities said that Gabriel Murillo, 40, and Kartik Patel, 37, hacked into the system in 2006 despite the city's efforts to block access during a labor action. Fearful that the strikers could wreak havoc, the city temporarily blocked all engineers from access to the computer that controls traffic signals. But authorities said Patel and Murillo found a way in and picked their targets with care -- intersections they knew would cause significant backups because they were close to freeways and major destinations. The engineers programmed the signals so that red lights for several days starting Aug. 21, 2006 would be extremely long on the most congested approaches to the intersections, causing gridlock. Cars backed up at Los Angeles International Airport, at a key intersection in Studio City, at access onto the clogged Glendale Freeway and throughout the streets of Little Tokyo and the L.A. Civic Center area, sources told The Times at the time. No accidents occurred as a result. As part of their plea deal, the engineers agreed to pay $6,250 in restitution and completed 240 hours of community service."