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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

This is not how the law works. If enriched uranium shows up at your door, you don't just get to hold onto it just because someone screwed up.

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Uranium is illegal to possess and is a tangible object. Data is intangible and can be copied. If Matt gave into a request to search his hard drive, said search could extend into other devices, online accounts, etc. And that wouldn't even prove that he no longer possesses the data

Uranium is totally legal to possess.

With many restrictions.

Not really. You can buy it on Amazon.

Now, enriched uranium is a whole different story.

Yeah, but don't buy more than 7 kg.

Up to a ton of ore I believe, as long as you don’t refine it. The rules are a bit inconsistent.

As long as you don’t hurt anyone with it, or try to blackmail the US with it.

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/831]

The 7kg limit is apparently a ‘depleted’ (aka refined/filtered) thing - https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part040/p...

But commonly misquoted.

7kg is a pretty large quantity.

It can be up to 150lbs a year if extracted from drinking water (!!).

If I give the uranium back and they want to search my house anyway they better have a warrant

Okay, but if you demand a warrant to confirm you don't have uranium, you can't be surprised if they are going to treat you as hostile.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yeah, who the hell does this guy think he is? We want to explore every nook of his house and he gets uppity? Clearly something to hide.

How is that hostile? To be aware of your rights and state they can’t do an illegal search?

Demanding a warrant to be searched is not hostile it’s the equivalent of saying no thank you. Hostile is when they have a warrant and you still refuse.

You cannot get a warrant without probably cause that a crime has been committed. So asking for a warrant to search your computer is literally asking to be charged with a crime.

IANAL, but demanding a prosecutor and judge be involved when dealing with an IT department is really dumb. If you can just agree with their legal team (and your lawyer) on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged with further crimes if they find anything ("fruit of the poison tree"). But insisting on getting hit with a warrant means anything they find can be used against you.

> You cannot get a warrant without probably cause that a crime has been committed. So asking for a warrant to search your computer is literally asking to be charged with a crime.

That is just completely 100% wrong. Warrants are not (or at least, shouldn't be, your mileage may vary based on your local authorities) issued like candy. Prosecutors and judges issue warrants when there is probable cause to search in the event of a crime being committed by you, or simply being committed within an area to which you have access that the public does not. That does not mean you are being charged with a crime. I would agree that more often than not, if you are having warrants issued for searches of your home or business, a criminal prosecution for you is probably not an unreasonable thing to be concerned about, but these are not the same thing. One absolutely happens without the other all the time.

> If you can just agree with their legal team on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged with further crimes if they find anything

This is the same fallacious thinking as "If I've committed no crime I have nothing to fear from being searched," and that's not the point: the point is it is your right to privacy that they are demanding they now have the right to encroach upon to ensure the secure and to-their-satisfaction destruction of data they erroneously sent you which cannot be performed without some element of highly invasive search, and also cannot be requested without the implication that they don't trust you to have deleted it.

This institution regardless of your individual opinions on it does not have your interest at heart: their negligence has placed the two of you as legal entities on opposing sides of a legal affair that can incredibly easily escalate to a conflict. Your lawyer is your FIRST call in this situation, and after that, you shut the fuck up and let your lawyer do their job.

WA state says you cannot issue a warrant without reference to a specific crime: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=10.79.035

So regardless, by demanding a warrant you would be insisting that the IT Department declare a crime had been committed in the first place. Even if you wanted to defend the legality of you holding onto ill-gotten data, why would you want to get the prosecutor involved at all? Getting a warrant on your property is the worst possible outcome here.

I agree you shouldn't do anything without a lawyer closing looking over the stipulation. But demanding a warrant is probably the dumbest available option. Especially when they already know you have the thing they are looking for!

>Especially when they already know you have the thing they are looking for!

I disagree, the conversation went that they wanted to Verify it was deleted. That is totally out of grounds for the city to want. The data in this case is contraband, but it was leaked by the city, and hosted by the city in the FOIA portal.

It totally misses the point, you should never consent to a search to verify you don't have it, especially to a third party. Ever. They want to poke and prod around, then it's a warrant and strict chain of custody. None of this third party forsenic firm stuff.

A warrant referencing a crime is not the same as a person being charged of a crime.

This is terrible advice based on a real misunderstanding of the law.

How so? What lawyer would insist on their client getting searched via a warrant?

> If you can just agree with their legal team (and your lawyer) on the stipulations of the search and confirmation, you can't be charged with further crimes if they find anything ("fruit of the poison tree").

This part is completely wrong. “Fruit of the poison tree” only counts if the original search was illegal. If you let them search for something specific, nothing is stopping them from using anything they find, even if it wasn’t what they were searching for (as long as they found it during the normal course of searching for the thing they were supposed to be searching for)

If you get to define the terms of the search with a lawyer, wouldn't that make the terms of any additional snooping illegal?

Again, I get that a warrant is a great bar to them searching your stuff. But if they already know you have what they are looking for, a warrant seems bad!

Friend, I don't know how to say this politely, but I'll try my best: you're really missing something fundamental here and I'm not sure what it is or why you're so persistent on thinking it's okay to allow a government agency full access to your drive through third party contractors. Please, for your own sake, do some independent research. Or talk to a lawyer. Or read articles about prosecutorial abuse. Many of us have told you this is a bad idea and in no uncertain terms: it's a BAD idea to allow unfettered access to your shit.

I highly recommend you take an afternoon off and sit in a criminal court room and watch how criminal cases progress through the system. Especially for things like drug crime, and especially when evidence is weak. You will learn so much.

Please do that for yourself?

Damn near all of them.

I would challenge you to find a defense attorney who would, in general, advise you to consent to a search even if you "have nothing to hide."

We're not talking about a blanket consent to search. We're talking about a controlled destruction of something dangerous.

I believe the issue people are taking with this approach is there is no "non-blanket consent to search."

If you invite law enforcement into your home, and they find probable cause or evidence of another crime, then they get to use that to prosecute you.

You don't get to say "but I had an agreement they would only enter my house for the singular purpose of X."

Well, all of them really. Sure, no warrant you can make an attempt to drop evidence because of overzealous police/executive power if there was no consent but the idea is to require documentation and to make sure the state (in this case) crosses their T's and does their I's before they can engage in this sort of conversation. Many times, if the case is weak, or not enforceable, a judge will not sign to execute the warrant or said people that want to search will not try to get one (either knowing it wont be granted or it would be denied.)

With the warrant demand talk, I would also say that once you make the demand - you give an address where you recieve service and do not follow up or communicate anymore.

> Many times, if the case is weak, or not enforceable, a judge will not sign to execute the warrant or said people that want to search will not try to get one (either knowing it wont be granted or it would be denied.)

Absolutely. Demanding a warrant is your protection against a weak case. But in this particular case, OP has already told authorities that they possessed contraband. The authorities already have everything they need to exercise a warrant. So insisting on one here is the exact opposite protection.

Again, OP was smart and worked with a lawyer to deescalate.

I bet the lawyer was even more adamant that their client would not surrender their property/submit to a search without a warrant.

I don’t speak for all of us, but I would certainly be one. The “particularity” feature of a warrant would be a primary concern, as would be the involvement of someone other than LE (I.e., the magistrate or judge signing the warrant).

Again, in this particular circumstance, where OP has already admitted to being in possession of the files, would there be any difficulty in obtaining a warrant for all of his computers?

I'm honestly curious as to what there would be to gain on insisting on a warrant rather than just agree to some deal and avoid criminal proceedings.

Well, then, you can just read my comment again. Particularity & a third party outside of law enforcement would be two great places to start.

This is brutally terrible legal advice, even for you not being a lawyer.

So the feds can just ship anyone uranium, then insist on searching their house “to confirm it’s all gone”, and you think they’d be able to get a warrant to do so if you refused to consent?

Bypass anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights with this one weird trick discovered by some guy on HN (civil rights attorneys HATE him!)

Or just say there's potentially uranium there? Pretty sure that's been done before

I can be surprised, in fact: it is my constitutional right to not be searched and they are a government entity.

This said, don't be surprised if there is some government looking guy sitting at your property line with a Giger counter for a few days.

Not quite equivalent. When the feds show up looking for the uranium, I can clearly see if they take my refrigerator with them when they leave.

> If enriched uranium shows up at your door, you don't just get to hold onto it just because someone screwed up.

Yeah but that's because there are specific laws regulating possession of certain materials (NBC capable, explosives, drug precursors).

Sure. But ill-gotten property is one of them.

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