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With or without a warrant...? EDIT: Not sure what's up w/ the downvotes. There are well-established ways for regulatory agencies (whether FDA, FCC, etc) to obt
by beambot 10y ago
With or without a warrant...?
EDIT: Not sure what's up w/ the downvotes. There are well-established ways for regulatory agencies (whether FDA, FCC, etc) to obtain firmware for devices -- and it almost always involves a warrant under extraneous circumstances -vs- proactively receiving proprietary code.
- ben_jones 10y agoWhat if they had to subpoena a tomato grown in a field next to the toxic waste dump? What if they opted not to examine that tomato because they didn't have the resources to issue, process, and support, the lengthy bureaucratic process involved in such things?
- beambot 10y agoWho owns the tomato? Who owns the land that the tomato is grown on? You can't just willy nilly confiscate other's property...
- ben_jones 10y agoBut the government can and should have the right to inspect a tomato (not necessarily a specific tomato) if all the tomatoes in that field are slated to go direct to consumers, right? Similarly, what about testing for drug quality? You could even extrapolate it out to the SEC's right to examine a private financial transaction in order to determine legality. Or the IRS's right to inspect one's taxes to determine compliance. Point is (IMO) there is a need put on government by society to bypass some of our "Inalienable" rights. In most cases this societal decision is necessary and makes sense, and I'm arguing that code inspection of life-critical systems is a reasonable example of such a case.
- throwanem 10y agoTo extend the metaphor, if the farm that grew the tomato is selling them to people to eat, I don't see that a subpoena is or should be required. But it breaks down anyway, because a tomato's source code is right there in it, with no opaque binary blobs to worry about trying to decompile.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoNitpick, but what you call tomato's "source code" actually is an opaque binary (or rather, quaternary) blob.
- pdabbadabba 10y agoI believe the downvotes are because the FDA has to approve medical devices before they are marketed, and GP was referring to the possibility that the FDA would review the source code in connection with device approval. (It reviews most other aspects of the device's functioning, after all.) Definitely no warrant required in that context.