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Dude, this is just manufactured outrage. Come on:
> Qakbot delivered additional malware—including ransomware—to their computer
Bemoaning the possibility of the cops trampling your petunias while responding to the arsonist literally trying to take-hostage-or-destroy every square inch of your property is being petty.
In most cases the victims were not aware, meaning they still had ample use of their proverbial property. This is in fact the normally desired state of malware, to act like a pest or a leech - your estate suffers but not in a very noticeable way.
I think most people would object to their yard being turned upside down because some e.g. illegal grasshoppers were present...so in that sense yes they should provide notice...if able.
Which is where the concept of "estate" falls apart a bit. Unless you can positively map every node to a single responsible actor, then it is unreasonable to provide notice. Furthermore, there are so many components to modern tech systems that it is not reasonable that anyone would know or care the exact goings on of their systems (usually).
That is, if you use the web and execute from it, in some sense you cannot (or should not) hold fully liable any one entity, in some small sense the malware has turned your computer into public property anyways, so the actions of the FBI are not entirely unreasonable.
If you cry foul this action then even more so you should cry foul the actions of any public update service etc...vendor updates always carry a similar risk.
What I could say, if there were some common message format for indicating to the user what was to happen, then it would be reasonable to require notification of such. But likely there is no such thing so mainly this argument is rhetorical.
You analogy isn’t accurate. The bot net wasn’t burning down or bricking machines. It was leeching bandwidth and cpu cycles. So a more apt analogy might be animal control sniping bunnies off your petunias and hitting a window with your family heirloom on display instead.
The only thing about this whole thing that makes me double take is that it happened without permission or notice. I really wouldn’t be happy if I found out tue FBI was rummaging around my machine removing files without my consent. It’s still my property and I’m sure I’d be happy to cooperate if the FBI raised to my attention that there was malicious software on my machine.
In general, such losses are understood as incidental and the searchee is not protected from them. If the police smash your front door in, they aren't responsible for paying to replace the lock; if they think you hid drugs in your wall and take a Sawzall to it, they don't owe you drywall. In the extreme, it's been found that if a flashbang burns your house down during a raid, they aren't liable to replace your house (even if the target of the raid wasn't on that property). Warrants basically suspend some civil rights temporarily; that's why they require a judicial concurrence.
So I have no specific case citation for data loss due to a digital search and seizure, but my guess from analogy is that if you have an unusual configuration (cracked the botnet control program open and stored your private Bitcoin key in there?) and the FBI's counter-net wipes your data, you will not prevail in a court of law, much as if your front door was somehow load-bearing and the cops, upon hitting it with the battering ram, knocked your house over. But since I can't point to a specific case to give precedent, hey, whatever you and the lawyer you can afford can argue, I guess. ;)