Warrants shouldn't be intended to discover evidence, they should be intended to secure evidence that is expected to exist in a particular location.

This distinction wasn't a major concern when the former was impractical.

Because of digital records and search agents, suddenly either is practical.

The intent of privacy law has always been to raise the cost of targeted prosecution. E.g. "We want to charge this person with a crime, let's find a crime."

The state absolutely has a duty to prosecute and hold individuals accountable. And in extraordinary circumstances, may even need to target prosecution.

What is unacceptable in a free society is that the state should have the ability to target anyone for prosecution with no effective bounds in the number of simultaneous times it does so (aka everyone).

The difference between Orwell and a safe democracy is scale.

I'm missing something.

In this case, the state is expecting evidence to exist in the form of incriminating email communication between Smollett and his manager, and possibly additional people. From the public evidence so far, it sure seems like a reasonable expectation! I'm a pretty hardcore civil libertarian, and I'm having a hard time faulting the judge here.

What else do you expect?

I would expect a warrant for just the e-mail exchanges between Smollet and his manager (and perhaps other digital communication methods), not for his entire life.

I hear you, but that doesn't seem like how anything works in our legal system. When warrants are issued for cellphone records, text messages, financial records, etc, they don't have so narrow a scope.

The state has probable cause to believe there is evidence of criminal behavior in your <insert anything here>. Therefore the warrant gives them access to it in order to look for that (previously specified) criminal behavior. In this case everyone expects to find a smoking gun in his email - either talking to his manager or talking to someone else. That seems like probable cause to me.

> In this case, the state is expecting evidence to exist in the form of incriminating email communication between Smollett and his manager, and possibly additional people.

Then why is the warrant not for _that_? Instead, we have a broad-reaching data pull that will be filled with a ton of information is irrelevant.

If you don't have enough evidence to specify the particular thing you are searching for, too bad. That limitation is written into the Constitution.

It is, though that limitation is essentially ignored by the NSA.