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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30 2015, @07:55PM
The government needs to prove two things:
1) That they really did come up with the suspicion that the accountant was guilty of tax evasion without getting the idea from his disc image.
2) That the image was still legitimately in the government's possession for the purposes of pursuing the fraud case against the accountant's client, and was not just being held on general principles.
If both of those can be shown to be true, then they should be able to get a new search warrant to look for evidence for the new investigation. This should apply even if the image somehow came from the computer of someone unrelated to the accountant, his client, and the fraud case. That is, the fact that the fraud case involves the accountant in any way isn't relevant. What is relevant is whether there is a legitimate reason for the government to have the image at this time, and whether the evidence they are using to establish probably cause was obtained legitimately.