Yes this stood out to me too. I don't really understand why a warrant would enable alteration. Copying I can wrap my head around, but alteration without oversight seems awful. Hopefully the warrant has more fine print than the journalist implied.
It sounds stupid, but I could see it happening.
they don't have imaging tools and/or write blockers?
Afaik it is practice in rule-of-law countries to hand a clone to each party in the case.
The ABC staff literally copied all the stuff that might be interesting (found using keyword searches) into a folder, which the ABC legal and AFP investigators went through one by one to determine what was of interest to AFP. The items of interest was then copied to a “sealed” package which the AFP pinky swears nobody will look at for two weeks while the ABC seeks an injunction.
Isn't this a huge problem? That the police can forcibly install surveillance applications in a news organizations computers.
Something like, allowed to copy and if that has an unintended consequence of modifying the machine, that is fine so long as evidence is not destroyed.