Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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Reading correctly, the commenter you replied to posed a question rather than stating any assumptions. You said 'in most american states, "obtained legally" != "legal to archive" != "legal to look at whenever you want" != "legal to share" != "legal to use for any purpose other than that which it was originally obtained for".'

So you seem to be claiming that these are distinct legal categories which affect the admissibility of evidence at trial. I don't think this is true; as far as I am aware, prosecutors and police can freely share information collected in different cases as long as that evidence is all disclosed to the defendant prior to trial (and early enough for the defense to prepare or seek a continuance etc.).

For example, it's legal (per the Supreme Court) to take DNA swabs from arrestees without a warrant even if no charges are brought, and all such DNA evidence is by default loaded into a national database known as CODIS. Your DNA data, according to a majority of the Supreme Court can legally be archived, looked at whenever law enforcement wants, shared, and used for other purposes than that which it was originally obtained for.

http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/dnadatabases.html

So again I ask, do you have something to back up your claim about things being different in 'most american states' or were you just saying you didn't think it worked that way?

> So you seem to be claiming that these are distinct legal categories which affect the admissibility of evidence at trial.

Ah. There's the hiccup. It wasn't my intent to be communicating anything about admissibility of evidence. Archiving, sharing, obtaining, perusing, using for original purpose and using for a tertiary purposes are all different actions, and which of these actions were taken and in what contexts would be evaluated differently by a judge ruling on a "borderline" case that is up to legal interpretation.

The Supreme Court, to reuse your example, has effectively ruled that DNA collection is, upon arrest, legal for use in all above activities, if I understand correctly. To throw in what I did think, no, I didn't know it worked that way, and I'm pretty happy no government database currently has my DNA data (time to look up relevant Canadian laws to see if this is true here as well).

I don't have anything particularly solid to back up the claim that most states would not automatically grant all the actions above as "legal" if any given one of them is legal in a given situation (like the Supreme Court apparently did for DNA swabs). It just seemed particularly likely given my priors and whatever equivalent situations or contexts I could remember (I've read two US state codes of law (Ohio and Texas), and I'd estimate 20% of USA federal laws, that are available online on their respective public websites).

EDIT: To clarify first paragraph: I'm talking here mostly about situations such as someone suing a police force or suing the state over privacy breach or somesuch, not about whether a judge would use what police did with phone records and whether they shared it in a Fusion to dismiss a case about child pornography, for instance. That's a whole other (and more complicated) ball of yarn, IMO.

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