3 ms·

But it's not a matter of using identical locks. He has offered to turn over particular pieces of evidence about particular suspects; but he refused to hand over

• bradleyjg 13y ago
  Analogies extended too far can be unhelpful, but I'll risk it one more time. His offer, made rather late in the game, was the equivilent of the super telling the police they couldn't enter the apartment, but that he (the super) would search it for them and pick up whatever they were asking for, if they were willing to pay him some money for his time. That might be a reasonable offer, but I don't think there's anything in fourth amendment law, or the statutes, that require the police to take him up on it, rather than just insisting that they do the search themselves. In my own reading of the case, the area of the government's actions that seemed the weakest was the applicability of the rationale for the probable-cause-less pen-trap and stored communication act requests (i.e. the third party doctrine from Smith v. Maryland) to email headers and usage logs from a service that held itself as not being able to access these things. In that circumstance it looks to me like the user does have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those (meta)data, and so a warrant issued upon probable cause should be necessary. However, this case also involved a grand jury subpoena. That's a whole other (troublesome) kettle of fish, one that frankly I'm not too familiar with.