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Comment by jasonjei | Hacker News Reader

How useful is a physical search warrant when much information is stored in the cloud? Wouldn’t it be more useful to procure one for the cloud providers the company uses?

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I think they'd want to look at email trails (and local copies of such e.g. Outlook data files) as much as looking for the 'big datasets' that Cambridge Analytica claims are now deleted. It's more likely, maybe, that internal emails from the time of the US presidential elections are still archived, and those would shed a light on the company's true conduct at the time.

I don't know if they're allowed to seize actual computers/hard drives (let's hope they have on-disk encryption), but I imagine that would be very valuable too.

Also, CA has had days of warning that this search is coming. Plenty of time to clean up.

If such a clean-up leaves even the tiniest trace and the investigators are worth their salt, this will land people in jail for obstruction of justice. Doubt anyone wants to risk jail time in their already pretty screwed situation.

Obstruction of justice can be less bad for you than the offense concealed, so if the offense is bad enough, risking punishment for that may not be irrational if it offers a real chance of concealing another offense.

The thing is that once you get to criminal charges, everyone is looking out just for his own head. The IT guy who will be asked to delete files couldn’t be gotten on election tampering, so he’s not going to commit obstruction of justice. And if you delete files such that the files are gone but the fact that you deleted them remains, then the government can implicate you for literally anything, so unless it was the worst of the worst crimes like child sex trafficking you’re probably better off pleading guilty to the offense.

If I were in charge of company that does what CA does, I'd specifically hire 'IT guys' that I have dirt on that is worse than any of this... Or I'd find dirt on people that my IT guy cares about.

I might be giving CA more credit than they're due in the smarts department, but considering that I'm just a dude making up scenarios, I find this particular one pretty plausible. And assuming the worst seems like a sensible approach in this case.

If, as is likely, the chargeable offence is breaching the Data Protection Act I'd probably rather plead guilty to that than be on trial for obstruction of justice or perjury

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