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Comment by pcaharrier | Hacker News Reader

> If I have access to your entire phone, I can use anything I find against you as probable cause whether it’s related to the crime or not.

Well, that gets into the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, but we're not doing a full criminal procedure law school course today . . .

Ironically, I heard more than one detective say that when they "dumped" a phone like that, they rarely found much useful evidence. There's just too much information on any given cell phone to be able to go through it all. So, in the end, their fishing expeditions end up being a waste of time and resources.

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If they have a warrant to the phone, what is poisoned fruit? It only becomes tainted evidence if they eg) stole the phone and rifled through it.

If they have a warrant that adheres to the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment, then anything they might find that it outside the scope of the warrant would be illegally seized. For instance, if the search warrant were to say "search the contacts on the phone" and they go looking for pictures.

That's why they get a warrant for the full contents of the phone though?

A warrant for the full contents of the phone violates the particularity requirement.

Have you heard about that being enforced very often?

I mean, there are a few noted here if you want a starting place for your research: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/p...

That does seem pretty helpful, I'll try and run down the list later

Warrants are pre-trial activities to collect evidence, defendants (or, more likely, their attorneys) are still able to challenge the admissibility of evidence should a case go to trial. If it turns out a search warrant was requested in bad faith, or the trial judge (which won't necessarily be the same one that signed the warrant, and then there's appeals courts) finds the warrant was defective (overly broad, lack of probable cause, etc.) and should not have been issued in the first place then any evidence stemming from it could be thrown out.

"Fruit of the poisonous tree" simply means the entire chain, the initial evidence that was improperly acquired and anything that was discovered based upon it, gets thrown out. If a warrant was issued to dump the full contents of your phone, and they used location metadata from your photo library to start determining other locations to search and got warrants for those, then that entire chain of evidence gets thrown out if the court finds the initial warrant for your phone was invalid.

> then that entire chain of evidence gets thrown out

exceptions: unless it would have gotten found anyway, regardless (inevitable discovery); or the cops, against whom the doctrine of poisonous tree is held in order to keep them honest, just made an honest mistake.

> If they have a warrant to the phone, what is poisoned fruit?

Litigation over the process, claims, and ultimately validity of the warrant happens after it is executed, where the product is used in a criminal case (one of the commonly argued problems with the FISA warrant process is that, because the products are not used in criminal cases, this never occurs, and because it is known that it will never occur, the constraints that the possibility of challenge places on both the conduct of executive agents seeking warrants and judges granting them also is missing.)

If detectives had limitless time and resources they could go through every damn doorbell and CCTV camera but they ain't going to do that unless the case involves dead kids.

Dead kids with wealthy or famous parents, anyways.

To me this is the real sinister issue with the current round of AI that I hear no one talking about. It will solve this problem for the powers-that-be.

That part sounds like a good thing? Assuming the warrant was legitimate- that’s the part that feels problematic.

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