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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

Is it? There's nothing in this disclosure that says they were fishing. It just says they identified the searches. It's entirely conceivable they had referer logs from the Guccifer site showing hits from Google at specific times and subpoenaed all correlated searches. Law enforcement being able to retrieve this kind of information when it's part of a legitimate criminal investigation is good. The worst nightmare is that broad powers get abused but in this case they caught the right guy.

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It's also entirely conceivable they didn't, and parallel reconstruction has been well-established to be a part of the US justice system for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Maybe. But there's nothing in this document to say they did.

Is this not the FBI's own report? Why would they admit to something of questionable legality? That's like trusting the internal investigation from a police department.

An internal investigation from a police department should be conducted by a department which is not directly related to the people (police officers) who are being investigated. The reason for this, is to avoid conflict of interest. If such doesn't happen in your country, that makes your country less free than it IMO should be, but don't assume its like this everywhere in the world.

OP seems to be implying that this disclosure is incriminating of some kind overly aggressive search tactic. I'm saying it doesn't seem to imply that at all. This isn't proof of their innocence, it just isn't proof of their guilt. They _might_ be guilty of something, but there's currently no reason to think that.

Even if it just for one person (which does appear to be what they asked for to me), asking for their entire search histories from all their devices seems like fishing. Particularly since they used it to charge him with new crimes (lying to FBI, etc) rather than the crime they were supposedly searching for.

Pardon m’y ignorance but isn’t that normal? If they got a warrant for your house and found new Evidence of new crimes there they’d take and use it.

No. That's SOP. If someone is a suspect in a serious crime, they'll search your house, your car, your office and subpoena your phone records. And this was a national security case so you know they're going all out to find every conspirator.

Do any of you ever think the spooks are engaged in a slow deliberate release of information to employ the concept discussed here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Kii-P7vwQ How easy is it for an intelligence service to inject packets and extract packets from their telecom network to do the real hacking whilst simultaneously trying to find a Patsy?

I really do wonder how many Patsy's have had their ego's exploited and got tricked into doing things so the spooks can control, manipulate, & exploit their targets for their own means.

Think about it, there are so many ways to control people and its been going on for tens of thousands of years when looking at religions putting the fear of god into people who dared to step out of line.

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