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The Justice Department is set to argue Wednesday before a federal appeals court that it may prosecute people for crimes based on evidence obtained from their computers—evidence that was outside the scope of an original probable-cause search warrant.
That's a big deal in today's digital age. Society has evolved to the point that many people keep all of their papers and effects co-mingled on their computer hard drives.
The highly nuanced legal dispute initially seems innocent enough. It concerns an accountant's tax evasion conviction and two-year prison sentence in 2012 that was based on a court-authorized search and imaging of his computer files. Stavros Ganias' files were copied as part of an Army overbilling investigation into one of his clients. Holding on to the imaged files for nearly three years, Connecticut authorities discovered fresh evidence unrelated to the initial search of the files and got new search warrants to investigate more of the accountant's mirrored files that were already in the government's possession. All the while, Ganias had subsequently deleted those files from his hard drives after the government had imaged them, according to court records.
The case asks how long the government can retain somebody's computer files—files that are unrelated to a court warrant. The accountant's lawyers said that once the government got what it needed regarding the accountant's client, the remainder of Ganias' files should have been purged. Federal prosecutors disagreed and said they retained the imaged files for numerous reasons, including for authentication purposes and to allow "the government to comply with its discovery obligations imposed by the Constitution."
What if it were a 3-D capture of all things in view while executing a search warrant — like a "cop-cam" on steroids?
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday September 30 2015, @05:31PM
The best analogy I can come up with is that they keep rape kits for decades. They have been retesting them with modern DNA toolkits and exonerating people wrongly imprisoned, and going after people that were found to match.
The difference is that the rape kits are clear evidence of a crime.
Data on a hard drive that is sitting there is evidence of computer use, but it is not clear evidence of committing a crime. It's not like they are using some new forensic technique not available 5 or 10 years ago to determine new means of tax avoidance that clearly leads to the person's guilt, and using that on the same data reviewed previously.
In this example in the fine article, they heard about or learned of new crimes and searched for new details on the same drives -- and found compelling incriminating evidence.
This would be like going back to the rape kit and testing the substances involved for drug use, or pathogens (perhaps the person can also be accused of spreading deadly STDs or commiting the crime while high). These may not have been examined previously, and may not be DNA evidence in this case -- instead, it's the same source material, being examined for different things, with different crimes associated with the search and findings of any data of interest.
The moral of the story is don't put all your ill-gotten eggs in one basket, especially if one is in the habit of illicitly planning egg gaining operations that would be wrong, and then saving them in another folder called Evil Tax Evasion Activities That Are Totally Not Related to My Egg Thefts and crying foul about it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:31PM
A rape kit is different, in that it is obtained from the victim, and doesn't involve a search warrant - any evidence it ever yields is fair game. This case involves evidence seized under an unrelated search warrant.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:58PM
perhaps the soiled clothing of the defendant obtained in pursuit of rape charges would be more apt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01 2015, @01:21AM
Not to mention rape is a violent crime, one that everyone agrees should be a crime, making it analogous to this current case in exactly zero ways.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday October 01 2015, @10:24AM
The moral of the story is that the government violates the constitution on a routine basis, like they're doing here. And some people will bend over backwards to defend this.