The heinousness of the crime does not justify giving up or overriding Constitutional freedoms. Never. Not ever.
And if anyone is in place to protect us from that level of overreach, it's a judge. I cannot believe he's pulling a "won't someone think of the children!" in justifying (and creating some janky circular logic) this ruling.
The scariest precedent here is the level of crime dictating the flexibility of constitutionality.
Whoever, without authority, opens, or destroys any mail
or package of newspapers not directed to him, shall be
fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one
year, or both. -- Title 18 § 1703(b)
As I said in another comment here, the issue is when it goes beyond such information like IP addresses and goes to actually hacking, which involves running code on the victim's computer.
And all of this doesn’t matter anyway, because of how packet routing works. No one accessing the Internet can be reasonably expected to have any control over how their packets are routed on the network. You only control the next hop[2].
See for example: http://allthingsd.com/20131120/how-somebody-forced-the-world...
So I would agree to the extent that there can be no expectation of privacy for any unencrypted traffic. However, that’s just one type of hacking – snooping.
As for actual hacking – that is someone breaking into your system – this system has to be running on something, some sort of device. This device has to be physically located somewhere.
If an Elbonian comes to US and breaks into your house is it okay because in their country there are no lock on the doors, just a lot of mud, so breaking is not a crime? This is the logic here, as I see it.
What it ultimately comes down to is the US government wants to have it both ways. They want to be able to extradite people that hack into devices located in the US, but they want you to have no expectation of privacy when they are the ones doing the hacking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider-independent_address_s...
If they came to the US they would be subject to US jurisdiction. Hackers from other countries aren't, at least not always.
Edit: I mean prosecution. Jurisdiction applies whenever there are effects in the US, see link below.
Personally it never made sense to me how one can be subject to some random foreign country’s law by just using the Internet. But if that’s the doctrine it should at least be applied consistently.
See http://www.kktg.net/Notes/hacking-jurisdiction/ which explains this.
Edit: I've gone through most of the relevant sections. Most of the ruling is reasonable, the section this article and the EFF are complaining about is less supported by precedent.
The actual legal argument says that hacking is common enough that people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then there's this paragraph:
>Although this Court recently noted in dicta that the possibility of hacking "is not enough to defeat an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy" because it is illegal, see United States v. Darby, No. 2:16-cr-36, ECF No. 31 at 10-11 (E.D. Va. June 3, 2016), this Court stresses that child pornography often resembles an international crime. Similarly, much hacking occurs by foreign nations where the governments condone or participate in hacking. Child pornography is not just a national issue; it is an international issue, and at least a portion of the pornography in this case arrived from foreign sources through the World Wide Web
This seems to be the weakest part. It's saying that hacking can't be the basis for a lack of expectation of privacy, but that since some countries allow hacking, it's legal there, and if you're accessing stuff from other countries you no longer have the expectation of privacy.