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One warrant let the Gendarmerie copy all data on EncroChat phones indefinitely, and seemingly let them then use that data for any number of charges. That is kin

One warrant let the Gendarmerie copy all data on EncroChat phones indefinitely, and seemingly let them then use that data for any number of charges. That is kind of messed up. Burying it in "but we have to stop the drugs" doesn't change anything.

tantalor 4y ago
What are you complaining about? Are you implying that there should have been additional warrants required? Because the article doesn't say there weren't. All it says is, > Gendarmerie executed a warrant to secretly copy EncroChat’s servers Yes, there was initially one warrant. But there could have been many others. And even if there weren't, why is that a bad thing? What is your actual complaint?
- from 4y ago
  That the message contents of every user of a service were indiscriminately read without doing any investigation to see which were criminals first? Imagine if the FBI just seized the Yahoo! mail database and started reading messages because some of the users were criminals.
  - masfuerte 4y ago
    The FBI did do this with safety deposit boxes. And a judge ruled they did nothing wrong! https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-backs-fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-ba...
    - from 4y ago
      I think that's being appealed and in that case all the IJ was asking for was for people who had their stuff seized to have their names removed from some government database. Basically anyone who asked for their money ended up getting it back. > It went on to return everything in about 180 of those boxes after failing to produce evidence to support the allegations, court documents show. Those box holders retrieved more than $27 million. Attorneys for other customers say they recovered close to $25 million more through private negotiations with the U.S. attorney’s office. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid-forfeiture-judge https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve... That's $52 million and that's just from the attorneys they talked to - I think another LA Times article mentioned that around 5% of boxholders didn't even claim anything. They seized a few million from Poliak the owner but they had him talking about being a professional criminal for hours and hours. Still messed up but maybe if another judge sees it goes another way.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        The problem being discussed is not so much the government stealing people's money, it is the government searching your property without any semblance of a warrant or any shred of evidence that could be used to obtain a warrant. Per this ruling, if the FBI obtained a warrant to confiscate Google's servers using proof that Google is engaging in criminal behavior, they could then claim to start an inventory of every Gmail account in order to give people back access to their accounts. If they do so, they would then be perfectly justified in starting investigations into each and every Gmail user for anything they find in their emails, without any warrant whatsoever, because their inventory of the emails and pictures was not solely motivated by fishing for evidence. Similarly, they could seize a post office and do the same with un-opened mail, per the same logic.
        j-bos 4y ago
        Post office would be a much harder legal sell given it's a federal entity with plenty of precedence against that.
        formerly_proven 4y ago
        These cryptomessenger-take downs happened in Europe and most EU jurisdictions work very differently from the US as far as admissibility and searches go. In fact in several of them (France, UK and Netherlands iirc) you even have to decrypt your own devices to provide evidence against yourself if there is a reasonable suspicion that evidence exists. Actually there was a case some time ago very similar to your post office example: Someone was stealing letters/packages in a post sorting center near the Dutch-german border. Supervisors found a stash of partially opened/damaged/illegibly addressed letters and the suspected thief. Hand everything over to the police. Police opens all letters and reads them ostensibly to determine whether things are missing and where the letter is supposed to be delivered. One letter is from some german dude to some dutch dude asking for cannabis seeds. Oops. A few busted down doors later german dude is convicted, appeals on the grounds that it was obviously illegal for the police to just read his letter for no reason. Appeal denied - sure it was illegal for the police to do that, but he didn't get convicted based on the letter, but based on his plantation that was found during a raid. So, as a general rule, it usually doesn't matter how or why police knew about something, if they have solid, physical evidence at the end of the day, it will not be thrown out just because some constitutional rights were ignored along the way.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Wasn't it established that the whole sales spiel was geared towards criminals? If Yahoo mail was largely aimed at criminals I wouldn't have a huge problem with police having a look. Actual Yahoo has mostly ordinary people so I'm not ok with that, but this thing seems to be specifically for crime, no?
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      >Another network, EncroChat, boasted that its devices offered “worry free communications” and “the electronic equivalent of a regular conversation between two people in an empty room.” Is that "geared towards criminals?" I can see how you'd say yes, but there are plenty of other people who would be interested in such a thing. It's also very similar to the sales pitch of any encryption protocol.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        Yeah but that doesn't say where the product is marketed. The copy can be the same, context matters a lot.
wmf 4y ago
General warrants are supposed to be illegal under US law but it doesn't stop law enforcement from trying. https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.p... Most of the cases discussed in this article are outside the US so I don't know if similar precedents exist.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Warrants deployed in the US today are nothing like the general warrant, which was issued to constables as carte blanche to harass random targets at will.
GauntletWizard 4y ago
I think "this service advertised itself as for use for crime, so we can gather all of it's clients data" is a reasonable scope for a warrant. This shouldn't work on AT&T (though room 641[1] showed that it does), but I'm less concerned about grabbing the mob's customer list wholesale than the grocers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
WeylandYutani 4y ago
Nobody cares about the fucking drugs. It becomes a problem when you have daylight assassinations on journalists in busy shopping streets.

tantalor 4y ago

What are you complaining about? Are you implying that there should have been additional warrants required? Because the article doesn't say there weren't. All it says is, > Gendarmerie executed a warrant to secretly copy EncroChat’s servers Yes, there was initially one warrant. But there could have been many others. And even if there weren't, why is that a bad thing? What is your actual complaint?

from 4y ago
That the message contents of every user of a service were indiscriminately read without doing any investigation to see which were criminals first? Imagine if the FBI just seized the Yahoo! mail database and started reading messages because some of the users were criminals.
- masfuerte 4y ago
  The FBI did do this with safety deposit boxes. And a judge ruled they did nothing wrong! https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-backs-fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-ba...
  - from 4y ago
    I think that's being appealed and in that case all the IJ was asking for was for people who had their stuff seized to have their names removed from some government database. Basically anyone who asked for their money ended up getting it back. > It went on to return everything in about 180 of those boxes after failing to produce evidence to support the allegations, court documents show. Those box holders retrieved more than $27 million. Attorneys for other customers say they recovered close to $25 million more through private negotiations with the U.S. attorney’s office. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beverly-hills-safe-deposit-box-raid-forfeiture-judge https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve... That's $52 million and that's just from the attorneys they talked to - I think another LA Times article mentioned that around 5% of boxholders didn't even claim anything. They seized a few million from Poliak the owner but they had him talking about being a professional criminal for hours and hours. Still messed up but maybe if another judge sees it goes another way.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      The problem being discussed is not so much the government stealing people's money, it is the government searching your property without any semblance of a warrant or any shred of evidence that could be used to obtain a warrant. Per this ruling, if the FBI obtained a warrant to confiscate Google's servers using proof that Google is engaging in criminal behavior, they could then claim to start an inventory of every Gmail account in order to give people back access to their accounts. If they do so, they would then be perfectly justified in starting investigations into each and every Gmail user for anything they find in their emails, without any warrant whatsoever, because their inventory of the emails and pictures was not solely motivated by fishing for evidence. Similarly, they could seize a post office and do the same with un-opened mail, per the same logic.
      - j-bos 4y ago
        Post office would be a much harder legal sell given it's a federal entity with plenty of precedence against that.
      - formerly_proven 4y ago
        These cryptomessenger-take downs happened in Europe and most EU jurisdictions work very differently from the US as far as admissibility and searches go. In fact in several of them (France, UK and Netherlands iirc) you even have to decrypt your own devices to provide evidence against yourself if there is a reasonable suspicion that evidence exists. Actually there was a case some time ago very similar to your post office example: Someone was stealing letters/packages in a post sorting center near the Dutch-german border. Supervisors found a stash of partially opened/damaged/illegibly addressed letters and the suspected thief. Hand everything over to the police. Police opens all letters and reads them ostensibly to determine whether things are missing and where the letter is supposed to be delivered. One letter is from some german dude to some dutch dude asking for cannabis seeds. Oops. A few busted down doors later german dude is convicted, appeals on the grounds that it was obviously illegal for the police to just read his letter for no reason. Appeal denied - sure it was illegal for the police to do that, but he didn't get convicted based on the letter, but based on his plantation that was found during a raid. So, as a general rule, it usually doesn't matter how or why police knew about something, if they have solid, physical evidence at the end of the day, it will not be thrown out just because some constitutional rights were ignored along the way.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Wasn't it established that the whole sales spiel was geared towards criminals? If Yahoo mail was largely aimed at criminals I wouldn't have a huge problem with police having a look. Actual Yahoo has mostly ordinary people so I'm not ok with that, but this thing seems to be specifically for crime, no?
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    >Another network, EncroChat, boasted that its devices offered “worry free communications” and “the electronic equivalent of a regular conversation between two people in an empty room.” Is that "geared towards criminals?" I can see how you'd say yes, but there are plenty of other people who would be interested in such a thing. It's also very similar to the sales pitch of any encryption protocol.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Yeah but that doesn't say where the product is marketed. The copy can be the same, context matters a lot.

wmf 4y ago

General warrants are supposed to be illegal under US law but it doesn't stop law enforcement from trying. https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.p... Most of the cases discussed in this article are outside the US so I don't know if similar precedents exist.

tptacek 4y ago
Warrants deployed in the US today are nothing like the general warrant, which was issued to constables as carte blanche to harass random targets at will.

GauntletWizard 4y ago

I think "this service advertised itself as for use for crime, so we can gather all of it's clients data" is a reasonable scope for a warrant. This shouldn't work on AT&T (though room 641[1] showed that it does), but I'm less concerned about grabbing the mob's customer list wholesale than the grocers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

WeylandYutani 4y ago

Nobody cares about the fucking drugs. It becomes a problem when you have daylight assassinations on journalists in busy shopping streets.