New York Judge OKs Warrant To Search Entire Gmail Account

jfruh writes While several U.S. judges have refused overly broad warrants that sought to grant police access to a suspect's complete Gmail account, a federal judge in New York State OK'd such an order this week. Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein argued that a search of this type was no more invasive than the long-established practice of granting a warrant to copy and search the entire contents of a hard drive, and that alternatives, like asking Google employees to locate messages based on narrowly tailored criteria, risked excluding information that trained investigators could locate.

Comments

Minimally invasive searches

[sjbe]

How does this differ from a typical search warrant for a premises?

It might not be any different. However even a warrant for a premises is not (supposed to be) without limits. If the information sought can be reasonably obtained through less intrusive means then it is supposed to be obtained through those alternative means. If the cops are interested in someones google account (or hard drive - same principle) because they have credible suspicion about information that may be contained there then a warrant is fine but only to the extent necessary to search for and safeguard the information sought.

Basically if the judge is saying that searching an entire account is appropriate merely because there is a chance investigators might miss something then there is a problem. The entire point of a getting judicial review prior to a search is so that searches do not become wider than absolutely necessary. Part of that is so that people don't become accused of crimes they otherwise would not have been under suspicion of. Giving carte-blanche to search someone's google account in many cases is opening up their entire life to a search so there had better be a damn good reason to permit a search that broad.

Re:Warrants are supposed to be narrow

[Sarten-X]

The investigation is for money laundering. It's not hard to imagine setting up a laundering channel months or years in advance, by conspiring with someone to accept a transfer of money and forward it on to some other conspirator.