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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.
I'm sure getting the house raided and the guy near arrested tops that.
Not according to Steve Jobs ;-)
She did it to avoid getting caught up in the rest of this sht. Seems like she was the only one who thought that this could come back to bite them in the ass. She was right.
I prefer not to live with people who have no problem with "finding" other peoples' property. You have to invest in big locks.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Let me make sure I understand this: these guys were in possession of stolen property, and they tried to negotiate conditions for its return? Gizmodo, you run a decent gadget blog, but Jesus Christ you need better lawyers. You are about to be one-two punched by the law, and you have no one to blame but yourselves.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Unfortunately this story makes it clear that the "finder" knew that the phone belonged to someone named Powell before he sold it to Gizmodo. Did Gizmodo know? Well they knew that the seller wasn't the owner. That's what the warrant and investigation are trying to find out. If Gizmodo knew the identity of the owner before the money changed hands, then they are in trouble.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Whilst you and your hoodie friends might not realise it, stealing a cell phone *is* a crime.
Read the part where the cops were allowed a warrantless entry into 247 Hillview. Dumb move. Hogan, by cooperating with the cops, ended up getting his own cell phone seized. He also ended up implicating himself. No warrant, no search. No statements unless legal counsel is present, who will tell you to SHUT YOUR F*ING MOUTH! Because nothing you say can be used to help you, but it can and will be used against you, as this case demonstrates.
Not to mention that you can't use a digital camera to "make a copy of the phone". It's a digital camera, not a replicator.
Not to mention that you can't use a digital camera to "make a copy of the phone". It's a digital camera, not a replicator.
Hey, it's the new 4G iPhone - anything is possible!
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.
If you've followed the story, and read todays affidavit, its perfectly clear that Gizmondo and Hogan both knew full well the phone belonged to Apple. The confirmation demand was nothing to do with establishing the owner for the purpose of return of the device, but to make something else for Gizmondo to post on their blog. Thus, no it's not in the slightest bit reasonable. In fact it may well add the crime of extortion to the list.
No. If the circumstances would have led a reasonable person to conclude that the item they were buying did not belong to the seller, nor that the seller was an agent of its owner, then they were buying stolen goods. Whether the owner has claimed it was stolen is just irrelevant--the owner doesn't even need to be aware that they've lost the item.
Think about it. You go on a backpacking trip to Europe, and your uncle the drunk stays at your house in the meantime. Some dude steals your car and abandons it at an isolated road, and your uncle doesn't even notice. Another guy finds your car, finds identification that ties the car to you in the glovebox, and drives it to your home to return it to you. But when they get there, your drunken uncle tells him that you don't have a car, and to fuck off. Does the guy now get to sell your car?
In the end, Gizmodo reported that they bought a phone for $5,000 from a guy that they knew neither owned it nor was an agent of the owner. That's basically an admission of a felony.
Are you adequate?
I'm afraid you don't know the law, not to mention morals. If you take a cell phone that doesn't belong to you from a bar, and neither return it to the person/company you know it belongs to, nor to the police, you have stolen it.
There is no evidence been presented of ANY attempt to return it. But even if there was a phone call to Apple tech support, and Apple tech support knew nothing about the phone, that doesn't make it the "finder's" property to sell. Many other reasonable avenues were open to return it to the owner or the police, none were taken. Instead it was sold as stolen property.
Don't ignore it. If you want to behave like you have no respect for the law, and back a thief rather than the victim, then the name fits. You could have "wannabe gangsta" instead if you prefer.
Yes. This is a serious theft of a valuable item.
People who've had valuable items stolen from them are not deserving of the police investigating?
Come back when you've grown a sense of morality.
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."
(yes, I read the entire investigation part of the affidavit)
According to Brian Hogan's room mate (pg 14) an "intoxicated male" gave him a phone believing it was his. Hogan remained at the bar "a little while longer" and no one claimed the phone.
According to Powel (the employee who lost the phone) (pg 16) he states his last memory of the phone was placing it in his bag and then placing the bag by his feet.he was there till closing at 11:00 PM local time. He left when the restaurant started to close and he thinks the phone could not have remained in the restaurant more than 15 minutes.
Brian's room mate called the police because the phone was synced to her computer and Hogan's and was afraid law enforcement could get the ip address and trace it back to her (pg 12). So she was calling to absolve herself from legal issues. Also when she was shown the phone it appeared apple may have already done a remote wipe of the phone.
George Riley says (pg 12) that the phone was invaluable and that the $8500 (yes, supposedly he got $8500 total, no source on the other $2500 though) that Hogan got the phone was worth the price of the phone if not more.
Brian Hogan and someone else (sorry, I'm getting tired of finding this in the pdf) knew the police were investigating and was in the process of destroying/hiding evidence. The police went to hogan's father's house and found Hogan with his girlfriend. He said that the other person had some of the evidence. Eventually they got a hold of him and he placed the other items in front of a church.
Only other gem I found in there is a quote as stated by brian's room mate when she urged him not to sell the phone as it would ruin Robert Powel's image he told her "Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn't have lost his phone"
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.
That seems like a lot of police work, DA work, etc for a piece of shit phone. People will cry about IP and lost sales. Bull shit. Steve Jobs says people will stop buying iPhones because they now know a new one is in development? Are you fucking kidding me Steve? You guys release a new model every fucking year. Only a dipshit retard wouldn't know that July is new iPhone month.
My neighbor beats her daughter and locks her in a closet and we call the Police, children's services, and they blow us the fuck off. To busy with real crimes like a missing iPhone.
Sad. Get a fucking grip people.
First of all, I haven't seen anything that says that Gizmodo or Hogan ever talked to Powell. Citation, please.
But that's not my main point. The main point is that, god, I feel like we're talking to second-graders here. Here's some very elementary moral rules that we adults teach kids in, um, elementary school:
This is all part of basic respect for other people's property. People who follow those rules don't run into trouble with the law when they find other people's lost property. Such people, finding a lost cellphone, would look through the contents of the phone to try and identify the owner or somebody who knows the owner, and then try to return within a couple of days. If they were unsuccesful in their attempts to return it, they wouldn't claim it for their own before consulting the law. What they wouldn't do is start using the phone for their own personal calls for a whole month before returning it, because that's wrong.
If Hogan and Gizmodo had followed those elementary rules, well, they'd be clear. Hogan might have started like that on night 1 (using the phone to find out the name of the guy who lost it), but it's becoming pretty clear by this point that as he realized the value of the prototype, he stopped following those rules, and his priority became how to benefit from somebody else's property, not how to return it to them.
Are you adequate?