Comment by voiper1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voiper1 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm pretty sure "due process" means being tried in a court of law. Buying data doesn't skip being tried in court.

I assume you're implicitly referencing that the FBI is skipping getting a warrant, but why do they need a warrant? Your information is already publicly for sale.

As other's have mentioned, it's not really an FBI issue, it's a general privacy issue - that companies are collecting, compiling, and selling this information and it's all legal. Which is darned hard to get people to care about - because it's convenient to give your information away. I know about these things and still use google for almost everything (I finally moved my business email to fastmail... but didn't yet bother to move my personal email.)

> Buying data doesn't skip being tried in court.

That's an interesting point. Wonder how foolproof/incorruptible the chain of custody is supposed to be for the provided data?

We've probably all worked on IT systems at one point or another that the outside world regards as really good, but the admins / ops staff know is really held together with sticky tape + bubblegum. Sometimes with data not quite being stored as it was entered (heh MySQL springs to mind).

> Wonder how foolproof/incorruptible the chain of custody is supposed to be for the provided data?

Not enough any prosecutor would prosecute someone based on that data alone. However, I do see a case where the data provided could be used to further an investigation. And in some ways, that makes sense. The data is a clue, but it's not what is going to put someone away.

It's a log entry. A log entry is only as good as your logs and provides a clue for further investigation, but it's not where you stop the investigation.

I'm not commenting on the legality or whether access to this data is right, merely my assumptions on how this data could be useful in one aspect that doesn't necessarily need it to be foolproof or incorruptible.

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