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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

So, we're back to what, the mid 1990s? Before anyone had a phone that stored any information at all? They should be grateful for the few decades of easy work. Now it's back to being real detectives.

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Not exactly. We used to have to keep many more paper records, which are really hard to manually encrypt/decrypt. Those were easily available to law enforcement.

The fact that paper records make many things more difficult meant that many fewer records were kept. For example, no one had a paper record of your exact location (or rather that of a flattish oblong chunk of plastic and metal that was always in your pocket), all day long every day of the year. No one had a record of which article in the newspaper you read first, how long you spent reading it, which article you read next, etc. No one had an audio recording of everything uttered in earshot of a stupid-looking speaker that sits in the kitchen of every bored housewife in the nation.

All of those records exist now, and LEOs should have access to precisely none of them.

I'm pretty sure people leak a lot more data into the "cloud", through their SMS messages, emails, apps, etc., than they used to keep in their desk drawer. On average I presume that there is more for law enforcement to go on these days than before technology got so pervasive.

And at least if they search your desk you know about it. The idea that people can go behind your back and look at your info is disconcerting.

Pretty much this. Law enforcement is trying to get their monetary share from crime (or "crime" depending upon how you look at it), and anything they can do to make that easier they want.

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