I guess you could always send someone to the courthouse in person, but that seems prohibitively expensive.
And anyway, how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans?
You don't pay money to enter Walmart but they are required to spend as much money as it takes to ensure you don't die in a fire while giving them zero dollars. Likewise food safety standards required by law aren't a sliding scale based on income. The relevant factor isn't how much money you made off the mark its how much harm your behavior can cause to that person.
If you put yourself in possession where your failure causes them greater harm you bought yourself a potentially expensive obligation that you wouldn't have for example if you just served search engine results based on search query or ads served without knowing the persons life story and the contents of their diary since the 3rd grade.
The actual answer is however much it takes to do a reasonable job or we ought to just fine you so much per screw up that you are forced to go sell shoes instead of search engine results.
The government can and should help make this procedure reasonable as it is 99% of the problem. Such orders ought to be cryptographic signed by hardware tokens that are physically in the judges possession on a device that isn't online THEN emailed to google. This relies purely on 1970s technology and probably should have been implemented about 20 years ago if we weren't collectively complete morons.
While this is implemented just coming from judges official government emails as opposed to their personal emails or a billion idiot cops would be substantially more secure.
Part of the problem is, because any cop can send an emergency request, in California there are 93,000 cop e-mail accounts, every one of which has to be protected from hacking.
By creating a bottleneck of, say, 10 judges per state who can issue emergency warrants (generously paid to staff a 24/7 rota) there are only 10 people whose e-mail accounts have to be kept 100% secure.
I dunno, how about all of it?
Maybe start with a few billion and then reevaluate how everyone feels about it.
I bet those aren't the only two options though.
Somebody notices my car parked there with the whiteboard laying on the dash saying "Griffith Shadow 3/24". Any responsible hiker seeing that is going to call it in.
The search and rescue team will look at that whiteboard and note the label tape at the bottom with various bits of information. It should be obvious that I'm inviting search and rescue to use the information printed there, why should a judge be involved?
(And the S&R guys will know it's probably serious--from reading that board they know I should have been able to call for help.)
For the same reason you still need to enter a sudo password when you use sudo for a trivial self-evident thing: It is not the trivial self evident thing we want to prevent, but the difference between a cop tracking the ex they are stalking and that missing person is literally just their no own judgement.
Trusting cops not to abuse a certain power is bad when you can just implement a little systemic friction that prevents large scale abuse.
This really isn't a reasonable expectation. There are only so many judges, and being on-call 24/7 for all emergencies is not part of their job description, and it probably should not be, either. They need clarity of mind when they're making decisions, not to be in a sleepy mood. Moreover, you seem to be proposing a solution in search of a problem. There isn't widespread abuse of this by cops in the US (that I've heard of, anyway) to justify upending an otherwise effective procedure.
There's massive abuse of police power to get access to data that would normally require a warrant. The only reason EDRs aren't abused more often is because it's often easier for cops to use more "straightforward" approaches like threatening the person/organization they want to get the data from, or lying (or misrepresenting) in order to get the other party to "voluntarily" give up the information.
Nobody said anything about "police power" in the general case. The discussion here is about EDRs, which you yourself acknowledge aren't abused frequently. Therefore it follows that making EDRs harder would not really solve that problem. You'd need to make other avenues for getting people's data more difficult before you contemplate changing this one.
One anecdote: a friend moved into a new neighborhood, a gated community. One evening when walking the dogs, a neighbor who is a cop greeted her by her full legal name. She said she never uses her middle name anywhere. As far as we know, there is no way the cop could know her middle name without looking her up. Who in any social situation greets someone by their full legal name (and that too without ever being introduced)?
As far as she can tell this was their way of telling her that the officer knows who she is, knows where she lives, and is watching her. Who does that?
- In my county (and every other county I've looked into in the US) real estate transactions and deed recordings are public record, available online, and sometimes include the purchaser's middle name.
- If it's a gated community, it almost certainly has a HOA, which would have an application/notification process (probably including ID info, potentially including a background/credit check) to feed information to the HOA board (which cops, being local government-oriented people, might be inclined to be involved with).
Occam's razor - when your friend moved into this gated community, it is almost certain they had to provide some background information, including name to the gated community. Might even had some contractual requirements that needed background checks. This person maybe just looked at the monthly flyer that was stuffed under every owners' door "please welcome Jimmy John Joe Smith living in 123 Fancy St." ...
As to "who does that"...police officers. Always.
Do you have a source for this? I just went to check T-Mobile for example and their site says they got 164k of them in 2020. [1] That's about 450/day, and it's just one company.
[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/news/_admin/uploads/2021/07/2020-Tr...
Counting homicides only gives you the "death" part of "life or death".
> any police jurisdiction can use an EDR to request immediate access to data without a warrant, provided the law enforcement entity attests that the request is related to an urgent matter of life and death.
I disagree. That sentence is unambiguous. Either that sentence is blatantly incorrect or an EDR does imply life or death. The two possibilities are mutually exclusive.
My state is only 10% of the population, so it's down to 45 a day. But it's still a lot.
It's so funny that you are using the word "proof" without using any logic or reasoning, but just talking out of your head -- "that number seems too large, so it must be wrong"!
They probably already do. Most jurisdictions have rotating pager duty. The on call judge is called the duty judge.
Imagine a discussion between cops and judges about secure software engineering without anyone knowing what a pointer is. That’s what legal discussions on HN are like.
Now you could try to argue the scale is actually smaller than I expect, and I'd love to see numbers to that effect, but the numbers I've seen so far don't suggest that.