Judge who signed Kansas newspaper search warrant had 2 DUI arrests, reports say | Hacker News Reader

Judge who signed Kansas newspaper search warrant had 2 DUI arrests, reports say

npr.org

164 pointsgoplayoutside51 comments

This is not even the most interesting part of the saga.

> We have now discovered that the probable cause affidavits were not filed with the District Court until three days after the illegal searches were executed. While the affidavits purport to be signed before Magistrate Viar on the day of the illegal searches, no explanation has been provided why they were not filed prior to the execution of the illegal searches.

https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/investigations/breaking...

Small town corruption got caught with their hand in the cookie jar on the national stage.

Love it. Put these people on blast on the national stage. This kind of behavior needs to be stamped out.

Absolutely nothing is going to come of this. I would love to be proven wrong however.

Illegal searches, seizures and raids happen too often and they (feds, cops) get away with it more often than not I'd imagine.

There's an entire federal division on public corruption where eager young feds seek to take down public officials to make a name for themselves.

Sure, there's no one to watch the feds, but this isn't that, this is state law...

Technically there's a FISA court to oversee warrantless wiretapping, but they appear to be in the tank with the FBI.

I suspect the that while this typically would see no material remedy it’s so egregious, and exacerbated by the death of the newspaper co-owner as clear suffering, and so notorious on the world wide stage, something will be done to make an example of the police and judge at the federal level.

if nothing else, the death provides a very clear pathway for a civil suit

A big part of what makes this sort of small town corruption possible is that it's really hard to get people from outside the town to actually care. This story managed to get national attention so it's much more likely than usual to have something happen.

My cynicism encourages me to agree with you; however, I think it's worth considering how much political capital is created or conserved by 1) protecting the five-member police force and some random local magistrate vs. 2) taking a hardline stance against Corruption by sending the feds in and prosecuting everybody involved (even/especially if charges are dropped in a couple months)

I assume folks are going to look into this. If she back-dated those affidavits (which, man, sure seems likely), I would hope/assume she can be disbarred? Which would be great, but I hope doesn't prevent fuller accountability for the Sheriff's office as well.

> The Record says it reached a deal with investigators to turn the gear over to a forensic investigator to confirm whether the equipment had been reviewed or examined before it is put back into service.

Good luck proving that with anything but water-tight phones (where any tampering attempt would leave tool marks) and T2/M Apple hardware - everything else can be read out with no trace of that ever being recorded, unless specific attention is paid to tamper evidence and logging before such an event: hard disks and SSDs can all be read out without leaving traces, if there is no permanent and regularly updated off-site log detailing SMART data (that would show an increase in the powered-on-hours and bytes read metrics as well as the event log), USB sticks don't log anything and for raw flash memory readouts of phones (i.e. JTAG-based) there is no record either.

Shit, just Greykey the judge's iPhone and let her unlock it for you. Considering the incompetence we see on a national stage with the FCC, I doubt she would even know what was happening.

How do these things work anyway? I get it that for older phones that used just passcodes, a bug in the retry time limit verification (or its bypass with glitching) is enough, but on modern phones the combination with a decent passphrase should be impossible to bypass.

It's not entirely clear. Originally I believe it was only a couple features; a bruteforce for the PIN/auth and some kind of social engineering process that tricked the user into unlocking their phone. Only a few details have really leaked about it: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/06/22/iphone-hacking-to...

At the end of the day, it's really just a little grey computer with a serial cable attached. You could update it with any exploits you want, and I can only guess what they're using nowadays.

> and some kind of social engineering process that tricked the user into unlocking their phone

I wonder if it could be as simple as letting somebody have "their phone", which actually isn't their phone but has been set up to look like it, then recording whatever pin they enter.

It's some sort of Three Stooges bullshit like that, from what I remember hearing. It seems more advanced nowadays though, and it's always hard to tell what's being sold under-the-table to defense contractors like that.

I'm curious how this is all going to play out.

Will crimes be exposed? If so, will they be prosecuted? Will everything by waved away by qualified immunity?

Qualified immunity wouldn’t be at play with accusations of corruption and collusion that are being prepared in the public space in this drama

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