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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

They should be required to attach a warrant ID to the device allowing someone to lookup the warrant however I am assuming in this case there was no warrant making the whole thing illegal.

Edit: they did have a warrant, which I missed reading the article.

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The source of that statement is the police, who have an incentive to lie at this point. And the statement is uncorroborated, and remains so by their own doing, since they're also apparently claiming the right to keep the warrant secret until after the investigation is over. Which doesn't sound too kosher. So you might've been right.

>since they're also apparently claiming the right to keep the warrant secret until after the investigation is over

Don't you have to present the warrant to the subject at the time of the "search"? In other words, you can't go knock on someone's door, claim that you have a warrant to search the house, and refuse to show it to him.

Don't know how it works for this specific case, but for surveillance warrants it's obviously not a requirement (e.g. tapping someone's phone doesn't really work if you tell them at the same time that you are doing that), with different places having different rules if and when exactly the target has to be informed.

According to the article it looks like they did secure a warrant first.

What a ridiculous thing to assume. Especially since TFA features a statement literally saying "a warrant was obtained for the surveillance equipment."

There's no reason to assume that the statement is true, it's coming from the police, they could easily be lying.

There is, honestly, less of a reason to believe it's false. They may be lying but our legal system relies on us trusting the police to be honest and, ideally, strongly punishes those who abuse that trust.

I'm happy to concede that policing in America has long eroded that trust but it's still a requirement that you obey and openly communicate with anyone identifying themselves as law enforcement.

> it's still a requirement that you obey and openly communicate with anyone identifying themselves as law enforcement.

There is no requirement that you communicate openly with police. See: the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Actually yea - I was wrongish on this one. It's a state level decision[1] with different requirements and generally a requirement of suspicion of guilt. I was mostly thinking of surface level information (identification and the like) rather than any sort of detailed information that might contribute to guilt - but even that surface level information is still protected information.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes

Even if you don't trust police at all, it makes no sense for them to lie about this. The truth of the matter will come out in court, lying has no upside and significant downside.

What is the downside of the police lying? Assuming they didn't have a warrant then they either lie and it doesn't make the situation worse as police are allowed to lie or they don't lie and guarantee a lawsuit.

I'd understand the argument for why they're incentivized to get a warrant in the first place (even assuming parallel construction is a viable alternative to getting a warrant as they may be caught) but that doesn't mean they wouldn't lie after they got caught screwing up.

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