Tim Cushing writes:
Last March, the FBI raided a storefront safety deposit box service owned by US Private Vaults. US Private Vaults is all about privacy. It offers customers something akin to end-to-end encryption for their physical goods. Very little customer information is retained and only customers have access to their possessions. The company does not carry a master key.
This apparently led the FBI to believe the vault service was being used to store proceeds of criminal activity. It obtained a search warrant and yanked out the entire contents of the company’s Los Angeles storefront. Then it searched the contents of the boxes it had taken for evidence of criminal activity.
That would normally be fine, considering the FBI is in the busting criminals business. But it pointedly told the judge who approved the warrant that it wouldn’t do the very thing it began doing as soon as the boxes were in its possession.
Read more at TechDirt.
Many people hearing of this may shrug and say it’s really nothing new — that it’s just one more instance of the government violating the very laws it is sworn to protect. But is it just another instance or is part of a significantly worsening situation where those in law enforcement are more likely to break the law rather than to protect it? See Tim Cushing’s article the very next day, FBI Email: Whole Lot Of Agents Think January 6 Capitol Raiders Did Nothing Wrong. If employees of the FBI and Secret Service believe that any of these things are justifiable, they need to be retrained, supervised more closely, or flat-out given an Apple watch and shown the door.