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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

This story omits the most crucial information: why was the warrant issued?

Judges issuing warrants is one of the least accountable aspects of our legal system. Warrants can cause major damage, disruption, or even death. There are never consequences for a mistake (cf. Breonna Taylor incident).

They can also cause political interference and there's little mechanism to prevent abuses. The FISA warrants against Carter Page were later declared invalid[1]. Document mishandling sometimes resulted in essentially nothing (Clinton, Biden) and sometimes warrants and raids (Trump). There could be good reasons for all of this but there's not really any mechanism to sort it out. Next time there might not be good reasons, and the target might be a politician we desperately need (rather than Trump).

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I'm an advocate of privacy for this reason.

A corrupt LEO can get a warrant to search your house easily, and so getting a warrant for a (completely automated process!) that hands them your entire digital life is even easier. It just takes a message to google/apple/meta and they have access to.... your digital soul, basically.

Big brother is scary, but corruption at the local level is a very real threat to individuals and democracy as a whole. Imagine trying to run an election against a small town sheriff who is willing to abuse their power. Within a local political system complacent in that abuse? This isn't hypothetical. The judge in this case approved this warrant.

Anti-privacy efforts like the current trend of anti-encryption proposals really need to be better labeled as anti-democratic by the politically active.

Document mishandling can lead to a slap on the wrist if you let the investigators come in and take a look (Clinton, Biden), but if you refuse to give investigators access, and brazenly lie to them about the documents you still keep, then their only option is warrants and raids (Trump). Then they might indict you, but only about documents that you didn't hand back when they asked for them.

If we call every legal action against a political candidate political interference, we have two systems of justice, and all you need to do to have no consequences is to keep running for office. Then any investigations on you or your family become a witch hunt.

The mechanism to sort it out is that the data must come to light at trial, and people can make their own minds regarding whether the investigation did everything that was remotely reasonable to get cooperation or not. But then again, thanks to the US media environment that is more interested in entertaining than informing, people's opinions might have little to do with reality, thanks to their own political biases. That allows someone to, on the campaign trail, call for locking up the opposition candidate, while claiming that everything is a witch hunt when any investigation heads in their direction.

They don't care. They undoubtedly know this and knowingly just lie about it. There's no point in typing that stuff out.

Of course, then I fell for it to. Politics here is bad enough but when people repost the lowest effort, lowest thought string-of-words they've been trained on... I mean, I could just go read Truth Social directly.

I see your point, but bringing in national politics is going to totally derail this conversation, imo.

For rights discussions you have to consider the exceptional cases, too. If we don't insist on rights for people we think are wrong, then the rights are hollow.

100% of the warrants I have read (all of which were signed and in the process of being executed) had obvious factual errors in them, and all had been made under penalty of perjury by law enforcement.

There is no accountability.

> Document mishandling sometimes resulted in essentially nothing (Clinton, Biden) and sometimes warrants and raids (Trump).

“Document mishandling” (with classified documents) always results in an investigation. When there is overwhelming evidence that the investigation is being actively obstructed, things get spicy.

> Document mishandling sometimes resulted in essentially nothing (Clinton, Biden) and sometimes warrants and raids (Trump).

Apples and oranges. Trump got raided because he refused to cooperate with the document investigators. And the only way to do that was to get warrants.

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