Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I think Jon took a few too many creative liberties here for the sake of entertainment.

1. According to Gizmodo the door was broken in because the journalist wasn't at home. He was having dinner in a restaurant, arrived later when the search was already in progress. The authorities acted respectfully with his belongings, etc. There is a huge difference between ringing the bell a few times and breaking the door when nobody answers and driving a truck through the front door at 60MPH, just because you can. Jon suggests the latter approach was taken.

2. He said that Apple claimed the prototype wasn't theirs, and that they didn't want it back. Comedy Central completely made this up! Apple definitely wanted the device back the moment it got lost.

3. Stop hammering on the "THEY BROKE THE DOOR!" bit. It's completely standard police practice, and it's not the Wrath Of Jobs.

That said, it goes without saying that Apple isn't the little guy anymore, and calling out Apple for its Big Brother tendencies is completely fair.

The matter was not something that needed to be attended to at 9:45 pm on a Friday night. They could have done it during business hours. Actually, they did not even need to visit the premises. They could have used a subpoena.

Take it up with the police, not Apple.

Apple sits on the steering committee of the police unit that entered Chen's house. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1795

Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.

Which means what, exactly? That the steering committee forced a judge to sign a search warrant without first presenting probable cause? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's not what steering committees do.

Does it mean that no one on the steering committee should be allowed report a crime and avail themselves of the services of the force?

Accusation is hard, lets go insinuating! Hey look, the author of that article used to work for Gawker!

They could have used a subpoena

If you're investigating a possible crime, you don't say "Hey, at your convenience could you get us your computers for us to look at?" You get a warrant and take the computers as soon as possible.

You can argue whether or not the warrant should have been issued, but once it was, the rest of the raid seemed pretty standard.

Not really. People get arrested for old oustanding warrants all the time, search warrant backlogs are pretty common. In fact, in general it is a good idea to back off a bit. It creates a false sense of security in the suspect, allowing better effectiveness when warrants are served, due to suprise. I know there is a "but they will destroy the evidence" protest, but in most cases, by the time a warrant is available the evidence will either be long gone, or completely overlooked (the stupid factor), this is one of those cases, he had plenty of time to wipe relevant drives between the announcement of a police investigation and the warrant serving.

The use of a raid force on a person who is not known to be violent and/or uncooperative is just excessive.

That's how you rack up overtime.

To not play fast and loose with the facts, the warrant was signed at 7pm and Jason Chen reported getting home around 9:45pm, but the search was well underway at that point.

Not could have, should have. He was a journalist which means he should have a subpoena.

Well he was a journalist which should have gave him rights against stuff like this (protect sources etc). They took ALL his computers, not just stuff related to the stolen iPhone, again breaking the law that is meant to protect sources.

And if I recall when the story first broke, Apple did not admit it was their prototype until the pictures and story came out.

> the law that is meant to protect sources

IANAL. Nor do I know all about journalists' rights v. police procedures, but I am puzzled at all the press and online discussion about "protecting sources":

Seems to me that journalists should be able to protect sources of * information * - which is different than protecting sources of * stolen property† *

___________________

†or "stolen-ish" - whatever Calif calls found property that is supposed to lead to legitimate attempts to return it to rightful owner.

The problem is, by serving a warrant and confiscating all his computers and related devices, they've bypassed his ability to protect sources not just in this case, but in all other cases, as well. That's the rationale for making the legal path subpoenas rather than search warrants with journalists.

[Chief Deputy District Attorney] Wagstaffe said Chen’s computers, hard drives and servers would remain untouched until investigators determine whether Chen is indeed protected by the shield law. -- http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/04/26/da...

But guy had already returned the phone - so for what purpose was the search in any case - and why not just call him in - it's not like he posted his own face on his own blog or anything? Apple could be perceived as going too far to protect an average design here.

Well that's sort of the part that John (and many other journalists, comedic or not) glossed over: the whole theft of property thing. It's not about recovering the phone, because this isn't Apple's civil suit. This is a criminal investigation. And while Apple may have been instrumental to getting it started so promptly, it's really out of their hands at this point.

I think that many journalists are sort of waltzing around the edge of this story because at least a few of them understand that there could be some serious repercussions on how shield laws are interpreted in America.

It's a very complex issue that doesn't really lend itself well to a comedy treatment. You have a very shady scenario with an Apple engineer that Gizmodo claims must have “left the phone there” (but is that true? probably we'll never know). You have a shady scenario with the finder who somehow knew or was simply a shitty enough person not to return a lost phone to the bar (that's what I'd do, and what I hope any decent human would do). You've got the embarrassing situation of Denton's gleeful love of checkbook journalism. And now you've got potential criminal activity. It's a total shit show of Silicon Valley fail, no matter what angle you look at it from.

Daily Show just chose the funniest angle to view it from, but definitely not the most accurate or comprehensive. That's fine; outside of political satire they really don't have any assumed duty or responsibility to their viewership.

I am trying to figure out the criminal aspect of this as (to me) it makes no sense to search the guy who returned the product but it possibly could make sense to investigate the guy that "found" it. (In his story the phone was in a silicon case so you could not see the design). If I return someones' wallet the police don't bust down my door, so what (apart from the "Apple") is different here?

I suspect you'd be embroiled in a civil suit if you purchased someone else's wallet from a 3rd party and then posted in an international news publication about its contents.

That doesn't sound like criminal activity to you?

As for why they busted down Chen's door, specifically? No idea. I'm pretty sure that was not Apple's idea. If it was, we have bigger problems than how to interpret CA theft and shield laws.

Jon Stewart does comedy, not news :)

While true, the lines do seem to blur a fair bit at times, court-jester style...

We still expect him to get his facts right. After all, we love the Stewart & Colbert for exposing the BS of others, not generating new BS themselves.

Maybe the point of asking "THEY BROKE THE DOOR!" is to raise the question: why is anyone breaking doors for a phone?

on point 2, Gizmodo said that the person who found the phone attempted to contact Apple by calling their support and the response he got from them was basically they didn't know what he was talking about and it wasn't their phone.

That's because he called tech support, who had no idea what he was talking about and probably figured he was some retarded user. He didn't try calling anyone specifically via the corporate switchboard (like e.g. Grey Powell, the person who lost the phone, whose name and Facebook profile he got off the phone before it was wiped).

He didn't actually make an honest attempt, just a show of one.

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