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New York Judge Rules Against Facebook In Search Warrant Case
itwbennett writes: Last year, Facebook appealed a court decision requiring it to hand over data, including photos and private messages, relating to 381 user accounts. (Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, among other companies backed Facebook in the dispute). On Tuesday, Judge Dianne Renwick of the New York State Supreme Court ruled against Facebook, saying that Facebook has no legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of search warrants served on its users.
Except that the defendant/accused isn't informed of the search warrant.
Effectively, this ruling says that NOBODY can challenge search warrants.
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That is the fundamental problem.
The only party served the warrant is judged to have no standing to contest it and the party that the warrant is about is never informed about the warrant.
It should be completely unconstitutional but in the end the world runs by might makes right and the constitution is just a piece of paper they pay lip service to.
Judges will not support the average person over their government and corporate interests.
Secret search warrants should not be allowed but I don't see any actual way to stop them. After the Citizen's United ruling any candidate that tries to run on the basis of trying to clean this kind of stuff up is going to get stomped by the other side since the other side will have nearly unlimited funds.
In the end money decides politics and politics are explicitly for sale to the highest bidder now. The supreme court even declared it is not bribery and we all know that it is. The system is corrupt from top to bottom and baked in. European countries are not any better with that either.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
1. Pretense: Find or create some kind of probable cause for a warrant. Doesn't in any way have to be related to what you're really looking for or anything you think he's really doing, just plausible enough to get rubber stamped by a friendly judge.
2. Fishing: Search through third parties like cell phone records, bank records, email records, social media records etc. under NDA, since the person won't know he can't challenge them.
3. Parallel construction: Using the information gathered above, find some law they're actually breaking and "randomly" catch them in the act. Preferably one that'll let you go through the rest of their belongings.
4. Fine tooth comb: Most people break the law in many small ways, just hit them with all of them. And even ones that won't stick, just to get the total and the defense burden high.
5. Buy high, sell low: Have the prosecution offer you a "deal" where you can either take 10% of a ridiculous figure or try it in full court, knowing a few of the lesser charges will stick so the prosecution won't look like a total sham,
Only 62 of 381 in the Facebook case were ever charged with any crime. The remaining 300+ are still totally unaware the government has seen through everything they've done on Facebook, since it's all under NDA. You can't challenge or suppress a warrant until the government tries to use it against you in a criminal case. This reminds me of the NSA wiretaps, since they've officially never admitted to wiretapping anybody there's nobody with standing to sue. It's a nice end-run around the constitution, that's for sure.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This case has nothing to do with "nonsensical legislation." It is straightforward rules of evidence and criminal procedure. The judge didn't say the warrant was OK, she just said that:
1) an invalid warrant "on a computer" is the same as an invalid warrant i.r.l. Meaning that a properly issued warrant gets served, then the thing the prosecutor wants to search gets searched, then if the defendant has reason to believe that the warrant was improperly issued or the search was done improperly, then those issues get brought up at trial to determine the admissibility of the evidence obtained from the search. It's what you see in courtroom dramas when evidence gets thrown out at trial - note that it is getting thrown out at trial, not being prevented from being found in the first place.
2) Even if the warrant was improper, Facebook isn't the defendant here and isn't the right person to challenge it anyways. Let's say the prosecutors suspect that you used rat poison bought at the local mom & pop general store to poison somebody. And the mom & pop store doesn't have any computers - you paid cash and they just took an old fashioned carbon copy imprint of your credit card. So they get a warrant to go through all those paper receipts to prove that you bought the rat poison. The mom & pop store isn't in the position to challenge that warrant, only you are. This case with Facebook is the same thing just "on a computer"
If we want to hold that "on a computer" isn't anything unique or different for patent purposes, we can't argue that "on a computer" has a different meaning for rules of evidence in a criminal proceeding.