The “plain hearing” doctrine now dictates when cops must hang up on wiretaps | Hacker News Reader

The “plain hearing” doctrine now dictates when cops must hang up on wiretaps

arstechnica.com

31 pointsTomte15 comments

So if I'm a criminal from a super-evil gang or something can I pay someone to come on any meeting call we are having, have him talk a bit on it, and kill him once it's over (giving money to his family or whatever) in an attempt to make it so people outside of the wiretap order are in the call thus making it so the cops need to hang up?

It's a confusing example, but is it possible?

My reading of the article is that they have to stop listening when everyone listed on the warrant leaves the call, not when there exists a non-warrant-listed person on the call.

That is, they can listen during OR of isOnWarrrant(), not just the AND.

So everyone gets a text-to-speech victim, listens to the conversation, but at gun point writes down something and makes their victim actually say it. Nobody talking on the phones is part of the conspiracy.

I would guess that if someone is saying the exact words they are given it would count as the person writing being on the call. I might be incorrect but law doesn't seem to be a discipline where the specific wording is more important than the intent.

> super-evil gang

> giving money to his family or whatever

I don't think you understand super evil.

Really though, the piles of bodies would probably get you caught at that point.

Insulating yourself like that is how leaders protect themselves. Cops go after the lower level people instead and people roll over under the threat of 20-30 years in prison. Plus RICO and related stuff.

From the article:

> However, the agents must discontinue monitoring the wiretap once they know or reasonably should know that the phone calls only involved speakers outside the target conspiracy.

No, as long as at least one person included in the order is on the phone, or could be 'reasonablely' assumed to still be on the phone anything gathered is fair evidence.

Or just use an encrypted line.

It's weird that the article says which president nominated which judge to the court.

> It's weird that the article says which president nominated which judge to the court.

Its not really weird, federal judges are political appointees performing a government function and research has shown, IIRC, that appellate judges tend to act, on controversial issues, in a way consistent with the appointing President on issues that were salient at the time they were appointed. So, who appointed them is very often something that is of interest to the kind of people concerned with reporting on judicial decisionmaking in the first place.

If you google "internet friendly supreme court justices" you get some results but its very clear why we're seeing harsher sentences for computer crimes than rape or murder in the US.

While google and facebook are courting the Obama administration on K street the general public is seeing precedent set in lower courts like, "Zuckerberg V. Im-not-touching-you" making headlines and setting the tone for international policy (fucking crazy)

While programs written by humans run roughshod over our rights we're arming them. We're driving them.

I still have the picture of my mother arm in arm with Sandra Day O'connor full of pride.

Where's our pride? Where is our classroom? Where is our law?

While Google aims to eradicate Flash from the internet it aught to memorialize Hypercard and the teachers that reached out to students who were more interested in stop motion animation or gaming than the details of a proprietary version of ECMA script. It aught to reach out to those children it yet has time to influence in every school and small town. Every Iowan, every Minneapolitan, every Fairfax and Mclean son of a nobody in a nobody town and replace the infection with inflection. It aught to remember how much money it spends on javascript testing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ60n_-BK6Q

When looking at judicial opinions it's common to indicate which President nominated the judge to show a general philosophy of rulings. This does not always give a good read, however.

Doesn't that doctrine only apply to the Ninth Circuit?

Its only binding in the Ninth Circuit as a result of this decision, though in the absent of any ruling on the issue from the Supreme Court or any other Circuit court, the Ninth Circuit ruling is going to be among the strongest pieces of persuasive authority on the issue to present elsewhere, as well, should the issue arise.

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