Yet another Hacker News

Should Police Wipe a Criminal's Cellphone Before Returning It?–U.S. vs. Stathas

24 points hn_acker 2 hours ago 17 comments

000000000001 1 hour ago | parent

My reaction from the title: "That's destruction of property, plain and simple."

After Reading the Article: "Well, given the circumstances, deserved."

Maybe don't engage/consume/manufacture CSAM and it won't be a problem.

mijowi 1 hour ago | parent

I would say they should have only deleted the data that was found to be illegal, but if that data was all over the place... I find it hard to sympathize.

Zak 1 hour ago | parent

Seizing and selling or destroying property used in the commission of a crime is common. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me if the value of the property is in proportion to the severity of the crime, and the owner of the property has been convicted of the crime (i.e. it's not civil asset forfeiture).

lazyasciiart 51 minutes ago | parent

It is common, and in this case the police were, according to the article, specifically not given permission to do so or did not seek permission to do so.

crote 24 minutes ago | parent

On the other hand: if you steal a pair of shoes, and the police find them back in your home, they don't get to burn down your house after your conviction.

Given how much of our lives happens on smartphones these days, willfully destroying personal data which is not in any way related to the crime seems like extrajudicial and unusual punishment to me, and not something the police should be able to do without an explicit court order.

ErroneousBosh 29 minutes ago | parent

Ah, see that's what I thought at first.

But then I thought, no, don't delete it.

Because then you can bust them for possessing CSAM again, just about as soon as you hand it over, if you've a suitably vindictive frame of mind, and you've no reason not to.

malfist 9 minutes ago | parent

Wouldn't that mean you're distributing CSAM?

compiler-guy 1 hour ago | parent

The right answer here is something like:

Usually not, but sometimes under circumstances enumerated by law. Like this case.

Zak 1 hour ago | parent

It seems to me that the correct remedy in this case would be to have a representative of the court preserve specific data requested by the offender, as long as it isn't criminal or harmful, at the offender's expense.

I don't think wiping an offender's phone is justified in most cases even if it might hinder them in potential subsequent crimes, but it does seem justified in this case where the phone contains significant material harmful to the victim of a serious crime.

lazyasciiart 52 minutes ago | parent

hmm, what did they wipe?

> [information] relevant to a possible civil lawsuit against the West Bend Police Department.”

No, the cops should not get to wipe data that could be used in court against them. Is this.... not obvious?

paimapi 7 minutes ago | parent

Not in America, no - https://eji.org/issues/qualified-immunity/

We need our slave catchers and Pinkertons as immune as possible from accountability. How else will they protect the interests of capital?

hungryhobbit 5 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, it's not that simple, and having read the article you should know as much instead of painting this false argument.

What ELSE did they wipe?

>the phone was rife with “numerous sexually explicit messages and images” sent to the victim as well as “significant personally identifying information about her” is not clear error. The record reveals that these conversations occurred over multiple apps on the phone and that Stathas also received explicit photos of the minor. The court did not clearly err by crediting the government’s assertion that “no procedure short of digitally wiping” the phone would eliminate all criminal or harmful material.

So a sex abuser used multiple phone apps to contact his victim, and instead of going into every app on the phone to see if it had child sex abuse evidence the police just wiped his phone. The court said (more or less) "that's not unreasonable: cops have better things to do than hand wipe criminals phones of criminal evidence".

Now is there a larger question here? Sure ... but lets not pretend police clearing evidence of child sex abuse from a phone (which the convicted child sex abuser claimed contained evidence for a lawsuit that very likely would never happen) is as simple as "police deleting evidence of their wrongdoing".

ktm5j 45 minutes ago | parent

As someone who's been a victim in a situation like this, I'm totally on the side of the cops. We need to draw lines somewhere. There's no good argument for protecting ownership of the kind of subject matter that was deleted here.

Edit: I would encourage anyone who's downvoting me to worry less about their own digital rights and spend some time thinking about what it would be like to have explicit pictures of yourself in the hands of someone who hurt you.

lazyasciiart 28 minutes ago | parent

I see no indication that anybody is arguing that they should not have deleted the images in question, and the police argument appears to have been more about making sure that all contact information across various apps was deleted anyway. The arguments are a) does that mean all the data on the phone needed to be deleted? (Doubtful) b) does that mean that none of the data on the phone could reasonably be extracted first? (doubtful)

ktm5j 23 minutes ago | parent

Well another response from a victims perspective: life is hard. He didn't have to break the law, hurting someone in the process. He can deal with the consequences, because we sure have to.

ImJamal 22 minutes ago | parent

Seems like the better solution is don't give a pedophila such a low sentence. Throw them in jail for decades. If you are going to release them, which I would not be in favor of, you ban them from all electronic devices. Any device that had "numerous sexually explicit messages and images" of children should be destroyed.

Problem solved.

meindnoch 8 minutes ago | parent

I mean, when police is destroying cocaine bricks, they don't give the empty packaging back to the criminals, even though the packaging wouldn't be illegal by itself. So if you mix CSAM in your data, expect the whole device to be destroyed.