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Comment by jubilanti | Hacker News Reader

> If I hand wrote some notes in a notebook or diary, I wouldn't have to hand them over, as I understand it, even with no lawyer in the mix. Same if I wrote some notes in a text file on my computer.

Absolutely wrong in the U.S. The police can't just break into your home and demand it, but a judge can 100% mandate discovery or a subpoena if there is reason to believe that evidence exists which is relevant to the case.

The 4th amendment prohibits UNREASONABLE search and seizure, and we let judges make that determination. You never have absolute privacy rights.

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Note that the judge is bound by precedent and law as to what "unreasonable" means, they can't just make it up as they go along unless there is no precedent. Otherwise the case can be reversed on appeal.

I was on a jury recently where we had to swap out judges in the last couple days of the trial. The reason was because the judge had been assigned another case where the defendant had not waived his right to a speedy trial. The judge wanted to finish his existing case first, the defense lawyers said "You can't do that", the judge looked it up and found out that indeed they were right, so off he went to start the new case and handed off the existing one to a colleague. In my experience judges really do take the law seriously - that's how they get to be judges.

Why didn't his colleague just handle the new case? What am I missing?

My understanding is that judges have certain specialties - one judge might be well versed in a particular area of law but not other ones. The case I was on was an area where nobody in the district had expertise, and everybody (judge, prosecutor, defense, jury) was learning as they go. The new incoming case was one that was in an area that our previous judge would normally handle. So it was assigned to him because it came in through his department, while the case I was on was sort of a free-floating orphan where not much was lost by having another judge handle it (and it was also already in the jury instructions phase, with testimony complete).

This. All of your rights are up for debate under a judge. There’s only a few you can still exercise if a judge wants something from you but ultimately if a judge decides it’s relevant to the case, it’s relevant to the case and you must comply. Or be held in contempt. Or praise? With a senate hearing to boot. I’m confused on how our legal system actually functions now but that is how it’s supposed to be. If a judge decides to include it, it’s in. Go get it.

One of my friends recently spent some time getting an OpenClaw instance running in Ubuntu so he could have a truly private conversation with it, complete with an air gap.

The value of that configuration has just been greatly magnified.

Has it? There's value in privacy vis-a-vis snooping corporations, but those conversations could still be surrendered to the court if the judge rules them potentially relevant, and if your friend refuses to do so, he'd be held in contempt of court.

The judge would have to know about them.

Perhaps this could be gleaned from your ISP's records, but it would be far more difficult than determining the existence of an account at Anthropic.

I agree, but it's not like Anthropic was running to tell the lawyers and the judge in this story. The most likely scenario is your friend would just let slip he's using AI, or people who know him would let it slip, and the lawyers or judge will demand the conversations for discovery.

If I was strongly motivated to gather AI analysis of litigation, I think that I would turn to Tor if possible, and remove any specifics from the discussion.

If you think that’s going to hide you, think again.

What if the AI is configured to only do ephemeral conversations? Nothing stored.

What if there's no typed or visible text, and the entire chat is done via audio?

Unless you personally developed the AI to do this, then it is almost certain that any third party AI is harvesting every nugget from you in one way or another. Even when they say they aren't. Like all the other big tech out there, it was designed for the makers not for the users.

This thread is about a locally running LLM, with an air gap.

How can a third party company harvest anything from that? Even if you didn't develop the LLM yourself, if you downloaded it and are running it locally with no internet access, I don't see how it'll leak info to a third party.

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