[famblycat]

"Equally troubling is that magistrate judge Margaret Nagle signed off on the warrants (literally, with a rubber stamp) without questioning any of this, from the look of things."

When judges sign off on stuff like this, do they consult at all with independent technical experts on the implications of the evidence, or do they just take the conclusions at face value? I sure hope they consult because even if they're good at what they do, how can they be expected to be any sort of check on the process when they haven't the technical background to interpret the evidence?

[bigiain]

I would have thought (without any legal training or local US knowledge) that the purpose of having a judge need to sign the warrant was to ensure the people writing the requests do appropriate research and fact-checking. I'd guess what this guy has done is technically perjury. At the very least I'd call it contempt of court...

I bet he never gets charged with it though.

[puredemo]

I wonder if a judge would be willing to shut down this site simply because it's titled "Hacker News." It doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibility considering the processes followed in this case.

[Corrado]

In a previous job I was told to stay away from any "hacking" web sites because they watch everything. I didn't read Hacker News at work for 3 months.

Thankfully, I got laid off from that job and now have a much better one where I'm encouraged to read all the hacker stuff I can. :)

[jrockway]

Yeah, I hear this from time to time. My guess is that it is too much work to read every site every employee reads. When it comes time to fire them, though, then they go through your browsing history so they can fire you for reading "hacking web sites" instead of "not doing any work". Just speculating, but I'm having trouble imagining a department where the reading habits of 300,000 employees are analyzed in real time.

[zacharycohn]

I think even beyond not having the technical knowledge to identify problems, there were a lot of pretty obvious problems (pointing to an article that demonstrated piracy helped sales, etc) here that the judge should be able to identify.