Political Cartoons

The terrorist attack in Brussels that killed at least 26 people and wounded dozens in Brussels' airport and public transit system Monday morning is the second major attack in Western Europe in less than five months, after the deadly attacks in Paris in November.

And to mourn with Belgium, which borders France, the French newspaper Le Monde published an illustration this morning from the cartoonist Plantu that seems likely to become iconic. The dates below the image, November 13 and March 22, are the dates of the terrorist attacks in Paris and Belgium. People worldwide were tweeting the image, along with the hashtag #JeSuisBruxelles, or "I am Brussels," which echoes the tribute to yet another recent terrorist attack: the killings at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket in January 2015.

Source: Vox

The government and police regularly use location data pulled off of cell phone towers to put criminals at the scenes of crimes—often without a warrant. Well, an appeals court ruled today that the practice is unconstitutional, in one of the strongest judicial defenses of technology privacy rights we've seen in a while. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the government illegally obtained and used Quartavious Davis's cell phone location data to help convict him in a string of armed robberies in Miami and unequivocally stated that cell phone location information is protected by the Fourth Amendment.

"In short, we hold that cell site location information is within the subscriber’s reasonable expectation of privacy," the court ruled in an opinion written by Judge David Sentelle. "The obtaining of that data without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation." In Davis's case, police used his cell phone's call history against him to put him at the scene of several armed robberies. They obtained a court order—which does not require the government to show probable cause—not a warrant, to do so. From now on, that'll be illegal. The decision applies only in the Eleventh Circuit, but sets a strong precedent for future cases. The American Civil Liberties Union, who argued the case, said that the decision is a "resounding defense of the Fourth Amendment's continuing vitality in the digital age.