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Comment by SecretDreams | Hacker News Reader

But the warrant still has to originally exist with, presumably, a timestamp that shows it existed prior to the search. And modification of the timestamp or lack of such a feature would be a good way to get the evidence thrown out?

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That’s not how evidence works in Canada. Illegally obtained evidence is still evidence - you simply also have a tort against the officer for breaching your rights.

It would be inadmissible if the court deems it to impact the fairness of the trial, no? https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...

Maybe. Courts aren’t magic machines that do the right thing.

You used a conditional so I assume you also know how such a system can fail. It's not hard to figure out how that can be exploited, right? You can't rely on that conditional being executed perfectly every time, even without adversarial actors. But why ignore adversarial actors?

This is such a weird attitude. We can't rely on anything being perfectly executed every time, so why have warrants at all?

Yes, in some cases, but this is not automatic, nor even close. The more serious the trial (ex, murder, child pornography), the more likely it serves the court’s interest to use the illegally obtained evidence. See https://doi.org/10.60082/2817-5069.3711 for a longitudinal study. Illegally obtained evidence is routinely used.

my understanding: within the context of that specific action; the evidence still exists. If there is less clarity about how and when it was collected though, there is far more opportunity to use broad evidence obtained in the periphery of a undisclosed warrant in other contexts.

The existence of a category of warrants that allows operation that is indistinguishable from warrantless searches creates a kind of legal hazard and personal risk that is hard to overlook. Police lie on the regular.

This is a good perspective, thank you.

...and are allowed to lie within narrow and specific contexts, which seems a "balance of rights" scenario. My fear in this case is that a lie of omission is far more dangerous (specifically for misuse) than a specific & explicitly lie.

I don't get why people downvoted you, this is a very reasonable question.

I agree with you. However, talking about downvotes is not interesting and against guidelines.

Improperly down voted comments typically even out in the end anyway.

There were two commenters that responded 15 minutes prior to your comment. I'd suggest starting there if you want to understand. Then if you disagree with those, you can comment and actually contribute to the conversation ;)

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