Are these specifically private posts/conversations? It seems like a logical decision for private stuff but if you're dumb enough to set your post settings to public and incriminate yourself then you have no one to blame but yourself.
> The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that law enforcement must obtain a wiretap to force near-simultaneous disclosure of private social media postings
I don't think you're correct to limit it to just DMs, as a private group on Facebook would - to me - be conceptually similar to a clubhouse (or hell even a "business" as MLMs on FB are called :D) or some such. You don't lose the warrant requirement just because it's a group of people vs just 1:1.
Yes, having more people involved means a greater chance of someone simply talking to the police, but the same applies to a single person you had a conversation with in your bedroom. You do not have any legal protection against a person you talked to telling the police/government what you said (with the exception of _very_ specific set of explicitly enumerated cases), regardless of how many people were present.
But we are not talking about people voluntarily talking to the police, we're talking about secret police surveillance of a private group. What the police were asking is "can we put bugs in a private clubroom/union hall/church without a warrant?".
Also, including what china did in HK in a conversation about rule of law, human rights, etc is simply not relevant by _any_ definition.
It is , but in another way - we are finding there is little daylight between us and China in terms of surveillance.
> disclosure of private social media postings
It’s not eavesdropping if it’s public. You have a right against self incrimination; that doesn’t make confession illegal.
IANAL but I think that wasn't questioned/decided yet. Rather the ruling hinged on a question about timing/freshness, and whether the police had to use one legal standard versus another.
The state argued that getting a feed on a 15-minute delay made it a request for "stored communication" held by Facebook (subject to lesser requirements) rather than live surveillance... and the court rightly rejected that reasoning as specious.