Okay, so -- your flip answer is pretty much exactly how the law should not operate?

That's the point of law. To come up with principles that you can follow consistently, regardless of your feelings in the situation.

This is incorrect. Context and details matter in the law and we all agree that is a good thing. As an example - 1st degree murder, 2nd degree murder, and manslaughter are all different crimes even tho they’re all “killing a person” - the context matters.

Should the police wipe criminals phones? No.

Should the police wipe CSAM-adjacent data from phones to protect victims? Yes.

One is a consistent principal that is bad/cruel/overly broad. The other is a consistent principle that targets a specific harm.

We don't disagree; I'd call what you are doing refining the principles?

Any sufficiently complex set of principles is going to have situations where two principles conflict with one another. This exact situation is one of them.

I would say they should have only deleted the data that was found to be illegal, but if that data was all over the place... I find it hard to sympathize.

Seizing and selling or destroying property used in the commission of a crime is common. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me if the value of the property is in proportion to the severity of the crime, and the owner of the property has been convicted of the crime (i.e. it's not civil asset forfeiture).

On the other hand: if you steal a pair of shoes, and the police find them back in your home, they don't get to burn down your house after your conviction.

Given how much of our lives happens on smartphones these days, willfully destroying personal data which is not in any way related to the crime seems like extrajudicial and unusual punishment to me, and not something the police should be able to do without an explicit court order.

I don't think it should be allowed without a court order. Extrajudicial punishments are bad.

I do think a court order should have been issued in this case. The offender's conduct was severe enough to earn him 15 years in prison, and the risk of continuing/future harm to the victim was substantial.

It is common, and in this case the police were, according to the article, specifically not given permission to do so or did not seek permission to do so.

Ah, see that's what I thought at first.

But then I thought, no, don't delete it.

Because then you can bust them for possessing CSAM again, just about as soon as you hand it over, if you've a suitably vindictive frame of mind, and you've no reason not to.

Wouldn't that mean you're distributing CSAM?

Ah, yeah, it kind of does, doesn't it? That's a bugger.

But then you have to *retain* the CSAM as evidence anyway.