This seems just as with any other search warrant - it's a specific search sanctioned by the court; just as a physical warrant for your house will involve LEO's that can search your underwear drawers for to verify if there's something relevant for the case, the same applies for your online records.

There's no new precedent involved, noone ever had any privacy whatsoever from a properly court-approved search. What's the most privacy-invasive thing I can think of? If a judge believes there's probable cause in searching your anus and other internal cavities and authorizes such a search, then such a search is compatible with all the precedent regarding fourth amendment in USA.

> This seems just as with any other search warrant - it's a specific search sanctioned by the court; just as a physical warrant for your house will involve LEO's that can search your underwear drawers for to verify if there's something relevant for the case, the same applies for your online records.

No, not really. A physical warrant might be issued for your home, your work and maybe one other place you frequent.

However, because this is very much not a specific search, but rather the whole year of data, it's more akin to issuing search warrants against every business you've walked passed in a year, whether or not you actually entered the premises, and that's just to begin with.

And if you tried to issue warrants in that matter, they wouldn't approved, because you do have certain reasonable expectations of privacy with regards to a court-approved search. Specifically, that a court will not explore things that are not pertinent to the case.

The precedent lies in law enforcement getting their hands on minute by minute details of your life from a year ago and probably much more. There might not be protections against this, but there should be. Judges shouldn't have too much power.

woah, woah, hold on. don't let him walk?! just use the old way for finding evidence. data gathered by companies like google is mostly permanent, too easy to retrieve, and in one place. that's the real problem. nobody likes doing hard work.

US police are fat and lazy. The days of a skilled gumshoe hitting the streets for information is a romanticized memory. The only time they get their blood pumping is when they get to use some new toys, kicking in a door guns blazing, shooting the family dog, killing innocents at the wrong address.

The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute.

This is a necessary "evil". We give up some freedoms so that we have a civilisation and an orderly society.

And this isn't setting up any precedent that is egregious. This is on the front page of Chicago Tribune newspaper and on the front page of HN. This is not some shady in the shadows invasion of privacy.

Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments. Otherwise it just becomes background noise to be constantly and without context offended.

Those records are mandated by The State and are very limited in scope. Nobody is idly wondering about the legality of X or Y in them, as one might in a google search, or making a culturally insensitive remark, as one might in a private message to a friend.

Be wary of the motte-and-bailey fallacy - the issue is not that The State can look at certain records in certain prosecutions, its that the records currently being requested are too broad and too potentially intimate to trust The State with.

>Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments

That creates an almost arbitrary, "this fits my worldview so I'll support rights this time" thought process. Like, "Well, this guy's a Nazi so we should trample his rights. But this woman's an abortion activist, so we should be sure to protect hers."

How do you propose we prevent ideological blindness in the protection of rights? Should we take the government's word that, "this time, it's really worth trampling rights"? Or would you create an unbiased oversight board that tells us when protecting rights is appropriate? Or should each person look at a case and decide for themselves whether or not they should take a stand against rights infringement?

There's a big difference between dragnet surveillance & executing a warrant. This was the latter.

This is not some shady in the shadows invasion of privacy.

I would argue that there are no rights being "trampled" here at all.

How is this different from a warrant that lets prosecutors read your snail mail?

I mean this passed the proper checks and balances of the law, and the only reason this is on HN is that's about electronic instead of paper mail, and it involves a big Corp.

The post office doesn't have a copy of all the snail mail I sent and received over the past years. Gmail definitely does.

but if you have a snail mail hard copy in your home, that's discoverable.

You gave up your privacy when you gave all that data to google, not when the state requested it from google.