Link here.
Basically the issue was that federal prosecutors had a warrant to find information about 10 baseball players from a computer. The prosecutors copied a spreadsheet and took it to their office. They then found data on over 100 players in the spreadsheet. The court ruled that the government should only collect data described in the warrant. If that is not possible the government is supposed to use an independent third party to sift the data and provide what the government asks for and only that data.
The government is trying to claim that the data in the spreadsheet was ‘in plain sight’*. The court rule that since the agents had to scroll through the document the plain sight argument didn’t work.
I am very concerned about this. If Obama and the government win it would basically mean that any data stored on another computer (like a server at a hosting company or your email at an ISP) would be open game if the government got a search warrant for that server.
Thoughts? Any legal folks got an opinion on this?
Slee
*IANAL, if my reading of this is incorrect, apologies.