Law and Ethics in IT

Please write a paper your analysis of the case below. Share your reasoning, thoughts and analysis, not a reiteration of the story. Professor Mark is a professor teaching at Colorado Baptist University. What you dont know is that he has another life under the shadows working as a hacker. His alias is Benz. Benz is a well-known hacker of extraordinary capabilities. Everybody in the hacking world knows Benz. Benz uses a super-duper device to do all of his hacking. This device is both wifi and cellular enabled. Two days ago, someone hacked into Morphosis, the largest social media company in the world, boasting two billion users. The hackers locked Morphosiss systems and threatened to disclose users private information, unless Morphosis pay two million Bitcoins to an undisclosed cryptocurrency wallet. The FBI suspects that Benz is the mastermind behind the Morphosis hack. The FBI sent requests and demands (based on the Stored Communications Act) to all three major cellular carriers hoping to find digital signatures/information of all individuals/cell phone numbers active in the vicinity of Morphosis server farms, during the estimated time of the hack. The FBI received in return from the carriers, four hard drives containing three petabytes (3,000 terabytes) of data. Remember, the Stored Communications Act, does not require a warrant. The FBI found nothing useful in the data received linking the hack to Benz. Serendipitously, Professor Mark was involved in a serious car accident, his car was rear-ended by a soccer mom driving her kids to a game. The police showed up to investigate the accident and noticed a computing device inside Professor Marks car that has the engraved inscription of the word Benz on it. The traffic cop became suspicious, open the rear door of Professor Marks car, and took possession of the computing device. As a result of that, Professor Mark was identified as Benz and arrested immediately.

QUESTION 1 Does FBIs request to the cell carriers constitute a search? Why or Why not? Remember, we are talking about search in the privacy/constitutional sense. This question can be asked another way did FBIs request to the cell carriers violated Benzs expectation of privacy (protected by the US Constitution)? Why or Why not? Hint: The way the facts are stated, and the way the story is told should help your analysis.