[GuB-42]

The 4th amendment is about unreasonable searches and seizures, it is also about "persons, houses, papers, and effects", that is, not files stored in someone else's computer.

The police here considered that a hash match was a reasonable enough condition to conduct a search, and that Google's TOS allowed it. They were wrong, but it is not obvious that they were by just reading the 4th amendment, and the situation is rather new, so it is reasonable to assume that the police acted in good faith.

[thanksgiving]

If I have documents in a locked briefcase in a hotel room, does the police get to read and copy them with the hotel operator's permission while I am in the shower? Assume that the locked briefcase is not particularly tamper proof. Anyone with decent lock picking skills can open one.

[scott_w]

Is it your locked briefcase or the hotel's? I believe hotels have the ability to unlock their own safe, so I suspect they're allowed to ask the hotel's permission to look without a warrant.

Also, if a hotel cleaner found illegal material lying in your room, the police don't need a warrant to seize it and prosecute you.

If it's your briefcase then I think they need a warrant.

[salawat]

The type of person who cannot draw a line of semantic equivalence between papers and files on a computer, is uniquely devoted to entertaining a level of obtuseness it is hard to seriously entertain. On par with people who think that "Arms" in the second amendment must only apply to muskets, cannons and such, and nothing after.

Tell me. When you put a bunch of papers in a folder, then put them in a cabinet, arguably under some semblance of organization in order to make later retrieval easier, what are you doing?

Filing.

The entire desktop metaphor, (the basis around which most computer UI is based), was chosen in part specifically for it's compatibility with non-digital processes at the time of software and the personal computer's fruition. Files on a disk, are in a literal sense, your papers. They are stored in directories(lists of things and where to find them, a.k.a. folders), areanged under the abstractive auspices of a "file system", and at times "archived" for convenient storage or transport. Gee. Same verbage as what you do with papers... In fact, your papers have nothing to do with dead trees except as an accident of it being the first prevalent medium for persistent info storage. Your papers covers the set of information through which you conduct your business with the outside world.

Those packets of paper are files. Those collections of 0's and 1s on a disk are files. Files are papers. Papers are protected. The involvement of a computer in the chain suddenly nullifying the essence of what point was being made by the Founders is as worthy of ridicule as thinking they went to war with their colonial parent state only because of a tax spiff. Or the civil war being only about slavery. It's evidence of a worldview most tragically impoverished; either by accident (which while regrettable, is at least amenable to remedy), or intention to push a state of affairs; to which one can only shake one's head and push on with their own life, and hope that maybe there are enough like minded individuals out there to counterbalance the individual's in questions aspirations.

Already spent more cycles on this than I should have, good day.