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Comment by dugidugout | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the added nuance here and would like to hear your comments on the seperate issue of doing this to a member of the press, or better, the sepcific pretext presented by the reporting:

> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”

> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”

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As long as there's probable cause for some crime, the subjective motivations of the officer are almost never going to enter the legal analysis. Whren v. United States[1] was a case about a pretextual traffic stop, but the core reasoning (unanimously) was about what the Fourth Amendment requires/allow. For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to run a stop sign or something and then pull you over and see if you left something in plain view, or if you act nervous, or try to get consent to search. At that point, the fact that the initial reason they started focusing on you was a mere hunch doesn't matter legally speaking. If this sounds like it can be used to make life hard for people that law enforcement doesn't like, you're not wrong. In my job we really didn't see how challenges to search warrants turned out, but as far as I'm aware the Supreme Court has never said "Whren only applies to traffic stops and not search warrant affidavits."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whren_v._United_States

> For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to ...

Whren doesn't seem to track in this case or am I missing something? In the example provided, the hunch directly ties the target to the crime ("drug selling"), which matches the stop's pretext. Natanson isn't accused of any crime, she's essentially writing about the "selling of drugs", not organizing or committing it.

Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?

Then extrapolating this to the implications on freedom of press... This doesn't sit well with me.

> Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?

If the police can convince a judge to give them a warrant for it, sure, but if they were targeting you specifically they probably wouldn't bother with the indirect route of your drug-dealing friend and would just harass you for j walking and not using your blinkers properly until you raised your voice at a cop and charge you with assaulting an officer.

I believe you have the hypothetical confused.

> if they were targeting you specifically

They are not targeting Natanson at all from what I can tell. They're targeting a source she's writing from (to what extent isn't clear to me). This is precisely why I'm positing Whren doesn't apply here.

I get the idea of being 'papered' out of a system, but I'm trying to distinguish a pretext that can be justified (objective probable cause) from one that can't (abuse of process). My boss can easily provide reason relating me to fire me, however fantastic the reality, but those would be refused, for good reason, if they surfaced them through private channels outside the organization.

In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence. The journalist is reasonably likely to be in contact with the leaker and so the cops have a somewhat valid pretext to seize things they thought contained evidence of the crime. Whether or not the cops should be able to do that is another thing, but the precedents have been long set.

The really strange thing here is the massive raid in the middle of the night rather than a more proportional response. That suggests that the journalist was being targeted specifically.

> In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence.

To keep with the analogy: If I had a public history of contact with the dealer (and was a prolific writer on the inner workings of drug trafficking), police could claim "reasonable suspicion" that I have communications/evidence related to them. That would justify seizing my devices for investigation under the same logic.

I agree there's more context to evaluate, but even Bondi's provided framing troubles me. It seems broad enough to target any journalist with relevant sources to a provided crime.

You'd have to be able to read minds if you want to establish a pretext. There are perfectly valid reasons, such as evidence collection against the accused party, to perform the search/raid.

I do wish that the law provided for concepts of minimal damage and repair should there be actual damage (not just creating a mess) that doesn't result in evidence. ie: if you tear open drywall, there better be something behind drywall that was collected as evidence.

However, that's not the case, and even civilly it's hard to collect damages even when it's the "wrong house"... though thatt's one of the few exceptions I've seen... also, iirc, there's been some 4th amendment arguments to construe having to pay for use/damages, not sure where that has landed.

IANAL.

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