The Need for Revisions to the Law of Wiretapping and Interception of Email

I argue that a person\u27s privacy interest in his email is the same as his privacy interest in a telephone conversation. Moreover, the privacy interest in email remains unchanged regardless of whether it is intercepted in transmission or covertly accessed from the recipient\u27s mailbox. If one accepts this assumption, it follows that the level of protection against surveillance by law enforcement officers should be the same[...] As technology continues to blur the distinction between wire and electronic communication, it becomes apparent that a new methodology must be developed in order to provide logical and consistent protection to private communications. The statutes must be revised so as to protect the privacy of communications while also providing a means by which law enforcement officers can obtain judicial approval to eavesdrop when necessary. Otherwise, increasing integration between data and voice communications will render the current statutory scheme arbitrary and impractical. By way of background, this article will discuss the law governing mail searches as well as the law of covert searches generally. This article will go on to discuss the regulation of pen registers, and will then trace the evolution of the relevant federal statutory and constitutional protections afforded to telephone conversations. Next, this article will discuss the statutory protections and the emerging case law addressing the privacy of email and other communication via computer. Particular emphasis will be placed on several recent federal court decisions that illustrate the problems arising from the current statutory scheme. Lastly, this article will discuss the controversial implementation of the FBI\u27s Carnivore software for the purpose of surreptitiously intercepting email, and the recent deployment of a keystroke-logging device as another means of learning the contents of private electronic communications. This article asserts that the Fourth Amendment protections applicable to telephone conversations set out by Katz v. United States and Berger v. New York (subsequently codified and expanded by the Federal Wiretap Act) should be implemented more broadly to encompass the surreptitious surveillance of postal mail, email, and other promising forms of electronic communication. This article argues in favor of more uniform regulation of covert surveillance of private communications regardless of the choice of technology employed to convey the message

Intermingled basins in coupled Lorenz systems

We consider a system of two identical linearly coupled Lorenz oscillators, presenting synchro- nization of chaotic motion for a specified range of the coupling strength. We verify the existence of global synchronization and antisynchronization attractors with intermingled basins of attraction, such that the basin of one attractor is riddled with holes belonging to the basin of the other attractor and vice versa. We investigated this phenomenon by verifying the fulfillment of the mathematical requirements for intermingled basins, and also obtained scaling laws that characterize quantitatively the riddling of both basins for this system

Validity of numerical trajectories in the synchronization transition of complex systems

We investigate the relationship between the loss of synchronization and the onset of shadowing breakdown {\it via} unstable dimension variability in complex systems. In the neighborhood of the critical transition to strongly non-hyperbolic behavior, the system undergoes on-off intermittency with respect to the synchronization state. There are potentially severe consequences of these facts on the validity of the computer-generated trajectories obtained from dynamical systems whose synchronization manifolds share the same non-hyperbolic properties.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

The Need for Revisions to the Law of Wiretapping and Interception of Email

I argue that a person\u27s privacy interest in his email is the same as his privacy interest in a telephone conversation. Moreover, the privacy interest in email remains unchanged regardless of whether it is intercepted in transmission or covertly accessed from the recipient\u27s mailbox. If one accepts this assumption, it follows that the level of protection against surveillance by law enforcement officers should be the same[...] As technology continues to blur the distinction between wire and electronic communication, it becomes apparent that a new methodology must be developed in order to provide logical and consistent protection to private communications. The statutes must be revised so as to protect the privacy of communications while also providing a means by which law enforcement officers can obtain judicial approval to eavesdrop when necessary. Otherwise, increasing integration between data and voice communications will render the current statutory scheme arbitrary and impractical. By way of background, this article will discuss the law governing mail searches as well as the law of covert searches generally. This article will go on to discuss the regulation of pen registers, and will then trace the evolution of the relevant federal statutory and constitutional protections afforded to telephone conversations. Next, this article will discuss the statutory protections and the emerging case law addressing the privacy of email and other communication via computer. Particular emphasis will be placed on several recent federal court decisions that illustrate the problems arising from the current statutory scheme. Lastly, this article will discuss the controversial implementation of the FBI\u27s Carnivore software for the purpose of surreptitiously intercepting email, and the recent deployment of a keystroke-logging device as another means of learning the contents of private electronic communications. This article asserts that the Fourth Amendment protections applicable to telephone conversations set out by Katz v. United States and Berger v. New York (subsequently codified and expanded by the Federal Wiretap Act) should be implemented more broadly to encompass the surreptitious surveillance of postal mail, email, and other promising forms of electronic communication. This article argues in favor of more uniform regulation of covert surveillance of private communications regardless of the choice of technology employed to convey the message

Application of transfer entropy to causality detection and synchronization experiments in tokamaks

Determination of causal-effect relationships can be a difficult task even in the analysis of time series. This is particularly true in the case of complex, nonlinear systems affected by significant levels of noise. Causality can be modelled as a flow of information between systems, allowing to better predict the behaviour of a phenomenon on the basis of the knowledge of the one causing it. Therefore, information theoretic tools, such as the transfer entropy, have been used in various disciplines to quantify the causal relationship between events. In this paper, Transfer Entropy is applied to determining the information relationship between various phenomena in Tokamaks. The proposed approach provides unique insight about information causality in difficult situations, such as the link between sawteeth and ELMs and ELM pacing experiments. The application to the determination of disruption causes, and therefore to the classification of disruption types, looks also very promising. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method can provide a quantitative and statistically sound criterion to address the causal-effect relationships in various difficult and ambiguous situations if the data is of sufficient quality