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> If it's really a matter of life and death, wake up the damn judge.

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.

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> 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.

> 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

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.

Actually nobody is in a position to say they aren't abused frequently so that is a completely unreasonable position to take given the centuries of corrupt behavior.

I wouldn't even know about the corruption if they were not so completely sure to be untouchable.

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?

The cop might have been going for intimidating, but there are a number of ways he could have had access to her middle name without abusing power:

- 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).

Why would this be difficult to find out? I can just check property tax records in my area.

As to "who does that"...police officers. Always.

"... a gated community ..."

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." ...

There's also massive abuse by police of the tools and information provided to them for non-official purposes. Police personnel that will casually run license plate checks for friends and local businesses will abuse other tools as well.

My state has hundreds of judges. I daresay they could convince some of these to run an oncall rotation for a slight compensation bump. It's not like the police are filing these EDRs every day.

> It's not like the police are filing these EDRs every day.

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...

All the more reason to get some oversight into the system. The CDC reported 24.5K homocides in 2020 [0], so one company's EDRs represented 6X this figure. I find it difficult to believe that each and every one of those 164K represented a true life/death scenario that would necessitate a breach of privacy by a government agent without any due process.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

"Emergency" does not imply "life or death".

I was basing it on this line in the article:

> 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.

You shouldn't read so much into a single sentence like that when it's so broad. That's just a summary they wrote offhand. It's not an absolute statement about every jurisdiction or company. Google around and you'll find there's more to it than that. Like "serious physical injury" for example.

> You shouldn't read so much into a single sentence

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.

I mean, you can call it "blatantly incorrect" if you wish. I'm just trying to discuss the facts, not defend the author.

1.2 million suicide attempts, 46k successful.

Counting homicides only gives you the "death" part of "life or death".

Do you honestly believe the number of emergency data requests aimed at preventing a suicide is more than a 2 digit number out of those requests? Nobody and I mean nobody in government gives one damn about a person in crisis unless that person is literally standing in the high place about to jump in which case they will surely show up in time to file whatever paperwork is required to initiate the cleanup.

I think that is just further proof that police are abusing this process.

I can't pretend to know what numbers are reasonable here, so you'll need more than that to make a compelling case.

Ridiculous. Look up how many homicides and suicides there are every day in the US. A lot of them are associated with such emergency requests.

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"!

Approximately 22,000 homicides, so not sure how those numbers help whatever you're trying to argue.

Huh. That's surprising to me. Thanks for providing that data point.

My state is only 10% of the population, so it's down to 45 a day. But it's still a lot.

45 a day for just t-mobile.

My state has hundreds of judges. I daresay they could convince some of these to run an oncall rotation

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.

I assure you I was under no illusion that it's impossible to reach any judge outside court hours. What I was trying to point out (and what you still seem to not be considering) was the sheer magnitude of the proposal. At some point it becomes a difference in kind, not just degree. Like imagine asking a dev to be on-call a handful of days during the year, vs. one day each week. The former is infrequent enough that many people would manage it fine; the latter really demands that you stop pulling them away from their normal job and start hiring people dedicated to that one.

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.

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