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Judge Orders Gizmodo Search Warrant Unsealed
gyrogeerloose writes "The same judge who issued the warrant to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's apartment has now ordered it unsealed, ruling against the San Mateo County district attorney's office which had argued that unsealing the documents may compromise the investigation."
You can read the entire affidavit here (PDF). It has a detailed description of the police investigation that led to the seizure of Chen's computers. It turns out Steve Jobs personally requested that the phone be returned, prompting Gizmodo's Brian Lam to try negotiating for a public acknowledgment that the phone was real. Apple was tipped off to the man who found/stole the prototype by his roommate.
Do you know how much the cell phone prototype was worth? If you think that the cost of parts was a few hundred dollars, you'd be wrong. Prototypes like this phone might have thousands of dollars worth of parts. Since it was a prototype, parts of the phone had to be custom made and were not mass-produced. Apple probably only made a dozen or so prototype chips. That alone raises the nominal value of the cell phone.
Then there's the trade secrets aspect. Competitors knowing what features are present in the phone can duplicate quickly them reducing their catchup time from a few months to no time. Also Apple has a point: People knowing a new model is about to be released may not purchase a current model which means loss of sales to Apple.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Reading the affidavit, the thing that disturbs me most is that Apple seems to have pet police detectives at their beck and call. The affidavit basically says "Apple wants to search this guy's place and take everything there, right down to any credit cards they find."
We can't even get the cops to investigate half of the violent crimes reported, but we're willing to call in SWAT to keep Steve Jobs' "Oh, and one more thing" moment in tact?
How about this? How about we let the police detectives focus on the mountain of unsolved violent crimes around San Francisco, and Steve, for your moment in the Sun, just hold up the phone and say, "Hey, look what we found in a bar!"
It'll be a big laugh, and some bloody victim will thank you for it.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Just to counter your anecdote, my car's side window was smashed at work in New Orleans, a city renown for it's failure of a police department, and when I called the cops they had someone there in about 20 minutes. And when that cop say some decent fingerprints, they called out a crime lab guy who inspected even more. All this for a car break-in, where I'm not even sure what (if anything) was stolen.
Sorry your local cops are so worthless that they make the NOPD look helpful. Maybe you should complain to your elected officials instead of /.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.