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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

That agents of private corporations can be granted the authority to conduct searches and interrogations is chilling.

Welcome to late-stage capitalism, where the state grants law enforcement powers to corporations in order to defend outdated business models and protect profit.

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Exactly! this is terrifying. The law should be exercised by neutral parties, not the plaintiff. This is the equivalent of you being able to imprison a person in your house because they stole something from you.

I don't know why this was down voted, I was honestly thinking the same exact thing.

It's downvoted because its precisely wrong - the court ruled the search was outside the bounds of the law, and threw out the case. People fuck up all the time, but here, the system worked exactly the way GP wants it to.

Certainly the ISPs are at fault here, but the Canadian court system seems to be working just fine. The existence of the Anton Piller concept is troubling, still.

A correct system disallows abuse to happen in the first place. I would draw a parallel to buggy software, that loses the trust of its users. I feel that the same thing can happen to a legal system: and then what will happen?

It still happened, even if "corrected" post-hoc.

The fact that the cable companies asking for the power to detain and search a private citizen weren't laughed out of the building by law enforcement is what's troubling to me.

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