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Comment by mrsteveman1 | Hacker News Reader

Then again, if a browser cookie is the only thing providing access to "evidence" on a particular machine, then it wasn't actually on that machine to begin with.

That's far from a mere technical detail, as it also means the person lacked any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence.

I recall there are some cases that centered on whether someone was aware of the existence of a browser cache and knew how to clear it. In that case the "evidence" really is on the local machine because that's what the cache is.

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>That's far from a mere technical detail, as it also means the person lacked any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence.

That would still be irrelevant if their intention for getting themselves to "lack any meaningful physical control of, or proximity to, the evidence" is deemed by a judge to be malicious.

You have badly misunderstood the point the GP was making. The person in question was always in a state of “lack[ing] any physical control of or, proximity to, the evidence”. They had no control of this in any way.

This, by the way is why the technical issues are important, relying solely on the lay person interpretation is dubious. A court that issued ruling on issues it doesn’t understand is inherently unjust.

>The person in question was always in a state of “lack[ing] any physical control of or, proximity to, the evidence”. They had no control of this in any way.

Well, if they arranged so they are always, from the start, in that position, with the intent to leverage that "lack of control" to not produce evidence (i.e. with doing some law breaking in mind), that could still be considering incriminating...

And that, in the end, is a lay person's judgement to make...

I think the point you are missing here is that the person would be purposely altering the state of the device after it entered police custody, with the explicit intention of restricting access to the information that the device either 1) had directly, 2) had stored in cache, or 3) had access to through cookies, logins, etc.

If you are doing something to alter the device itself in any way (i.e. the bits anywhere on the device), it's a pretty straightforward path to the clink.

What isn't clear, though, is if the device was, for example, an "approved" device on some site/services and you logged into your accounts and removed access. Let's say for the sake of argument you had an encrypted chat app on your phone and that service has both web and mobile access. Your phone and laptop are approved devices. The police confiscate your phone. As soon as they release you, you log into your account from your laptop and remove the phone's access. The phone itself hasn't been changed. I wonder what would happen there.

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