I’m still waiting for Orin Kerr’s promised blog post about a federal court ruling in Kansas this week, but Somini Sengupta has this in the New York Times:
Can law enforcement obtain a search warrant to dig through a vast trove of e-mails, instant messages and chat logs because they have reasonable suspicion that the owners of those accounts robbed computer equipment from a private company?
No, according to a ruling by a federal judge in Kansas earlier this week.
The case is significant in that it limits what constitutes unreasonable search and seizure, as protected by the Fourth Amendment, in the age of big data. The magistrate judge, David J. Waxse, denied the government’s search warrant requests on the grounds that it has to be particular and“reasonable in nature of breadth.”
Read more in the NY Times. The case is In the matter of applications for search warrants for information associated with target email accounts/Skype account.