Something rather horrible was just brought to my attention. It is the story about a 16 year old boy named Ashton Lundeby who was arrested in the middle of the night by a team of FBI and local law enforcement officers. Now an arrest of someone so young isn’t really news-worthy these days (shameful as that may be), but what makes this case special is that Ashton, arrested on Feb 15th of 2009, is still being held with little to no access to his parents, friends, or even a lawyer.
Ashton has been accused of making multiple bomb threats from internet-based phone calls (using Voice-Over-IP). The FBI then did an IP address trace that led to Ashton’s personal computer. With this information they gathered a search and arrest warrant for him and barged into his house in the middle of the night, guns out, to arrest him. There is a huge problem with their evidence that lead to the arrest, but more on that later. This boy’s basic rights as granted by the Bill Of Rights has been violated. The most obvious right being violated here is sixth amendment which states:
“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”
He has been denied a speedy and public trial for sure, especially the public part. His family has not been given much access to him, a gag order has been put on the case, there is no information for public record, and details about the charges are being hidden behind the Patriot Act. Without such details it is difficult to build a case to defend him. It would also seem that his 4th amendment rights may also have been violated, though without more details it is hard to discern if this was an unreasonable seizure of property.
Unfortunately the details on this case are sketchy, so that even if the FBI was fully justified in their actions they have also made sure that it is difficult to trust anything they say. Making people even more concerned that we are heading towards becoming a police state. However, even if the threats made did justify their actions, the evidence (from what I have read so far) seems to be pretty disputable. The evidence as far as I can tell that they have is an IP address.
IP addresses help identify a computer or other internet device or server on the internet and act almost like a mailing address. The problem with IP address tracking is that not only do most internet providers use dynamic IPs, which are regularly updated and replaced with a new one users log in/out or as their computers just automatically refresh its IP address. So these floating addresses make it difficult to pin down who had which IP address at what time. To make matters worse these addresses can be spoofed or faked to make a computer look like a different computer on the internet. Which means just about anyone could have highjacked his IP address and used it for nefarious purposes (though I doubt they knew who it would be associated with).
It is frightening to think that our government can get away with whisking away citizens, especially children, to undisclosed locations for no particular reason at all and hold them indefinitely. To read more on this case please view the links at the bottom of this post.
References:
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Tags: Constitutional Rights, Human Rights, Justice, legalese, Patriot Act, the internet
I did a debate case about this kinda thing once. I remembered hearing about him too, and mentioned him in my case. See you shoulda pay more attention to me