[katane]

There are legal obligations for the government to reimburse telco companies if they are asked to spy on their customers on the governments behalf. Also, obviously, if you want to use data as evidence in a trial, it needs to be stored safely by the police and sealed off, to ensure that its integrity is preserved.

So either the government needs to pay up, store the drives themselves or dismiss these thousands of harddrives from the witness bench.

Also, I cant see how the EFFs claim has any legal merit. Theres no obligation for a site to enable you to access data you sent them.