US Court Dings Gov't For Using Seized Data Beyond Scope of Warrant

An anonymous reader writes The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit last week reversed a tax evasion conviction against an accountant because the government had used data from his computers that were seized under a warrant targeting different suspects. The Fourth Amendment, the court pointed out, "prevents the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another." Law enforcement originally made copies of his hard drives and during off-site processing, separated his personal files from data related to the original warrant. However, 1.5 years later, the government sifted through his personal files and used what it found to build a case against him. The appeals court held that "[i]f the Government could seize and retain non-responsive electronic records indefinitely, so it could search them whenever it later developed probable cause, every warrant to search for particular electronic data would become, in essence, a general warrant," which the Fourth Amendment protects against. The EFF hopes that the outcome of this appeal will have implications for the NSA's dragnet surveillance practice.

Comments

Unsurprising ...

[gstoddart]

Cardinal Richelieu wrote:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

When you start collecting everything, either via expanding the scope of your warrant, or just scooping everything up ... sooner or later you can come back to almost anybody and decide that they've done something.

When law enforcement can retroactively file charges for which they had no initial probable cause or scope, that is a truly Orwellian society.

And, governments keep saying "but we need to be able to bypass all of these things because of kiddie fiddlers and terrorists".

I really hope we start to see the courts reign in the level of surveillance and how it can be used. Because, right now, so called 'free' societies and democracy are being eroded as government decides it needs to know everything about everybody just in case something ever comes up.