Roger Fingas
The U.S. Supreme Court has authorized a rule change that — barring intervention by Congress — will allow judges to issue search warrants for computers in any jurisdiction, instead of just the ones their courts oversee directly.
The new rules were sent to Congress by Chief Justice John Roberts, giving them a chance to be modified or rejected, Reuters said on Friday. If Congress doesn't take action by Dec. 1, the change will take effect automatically.
Opposition is already promised by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who said he will introduce legislation to undo the change. Wyden argued that it could allow the government to use a single warrant to search "thousands or millions" of computers at a time, most of which would "belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime."
The U.S. Justice Department has been pushing for expanded reach in this area since 2013, its own position being that it's a minor change needed to modernize the law and pursue criminals who anonymize their identity — something potentially easier to counter with remote searches.
Other factions on the same side as Wyden include Google, and civil liberties groups like Access Now and the American Civil Liberties Union. Google servers could easily be a target for the new search warrants, given the popularity of Android and services like Gmail.
The Justice Department has also been seeking the ability to compel companies like Apple and Google into circumventing encryption, though its efforts have largely failed so far. A proposed bill might salvage that goal.
Search powers appear set to be curtailed in another way through the Email Privacy Act, which should force federal agencies to obtain a warrant for email older than 180 days.
Charles Martin
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Malcolm Owen
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27 Comments
Makes sense. If a warrant can breach doctor-patient privilege, financial records and gain access to personal property, digital property should be no different. At least having to get a warrant creates a paper trail instead of keeping the law's actions secret.
This is a gross overreach of our judicial system. There's a reason jurisdiction exists.
This undermines the point of having legal districts. Not only would it magnify the potential number of inspections (due to the case load being distributed across the entire country), but it's also ham-fisted to believe that every justice in every district would be knowledgable or on par to the reasonable grounds for datacenter inspection. This will lead to an absurd rise in data centre inspection for frivolous reasons, and ultimately burden datacenter operators (especially smaller providers), but also get in the way of more urgent cases which can be prioritised by a much more knowledgable local justice.