The people responsible for investigating and prosecuting such crimes have some not so great incentives to avoid doing so and keep the whole thing secret though, don't they?
Sounds like an easy way to have your case tossed out in court.
It's funny how much this differs from my own personal experience with law enforcement. The friends I know are timid as hell and don't do anything without a warrant just to stay on the safe side- even if they probably don't need one.
Good luck with that. In my case there was a ton of violations of the SCA. Violations of the SCA are only actionable if they are "constitutional" in nature. (That essentially means that if the government indict you based on information they illegally gathered through violating the SCA but the information did not belong to you - say it belonged your wife or business partner - then you can't get the information suppressed/excluded in court)
In my case the government did violate the SCA and my constitutional rights, but two judges have looked at it and both stated the same answer - the police must be allowed to commit crimes to gather evidence. Next stop: appeal courts.
Yep, the courts side with law enforcement. The whole 'truth comes out in a fair fight' is completely undermined by this. The system protects itself above all else.
I was involved with a case that sounds similar - the judges don't care about your rights and blatantly missapply the law. Also, magistrates are also complete BS, and don't even know basic legal stuff. I had one think I called him prejudice when requesting a case be dismissed with prejudice... Complaints do nothing. There's no real oversight, leading to a completely incompetent system.
You have to generally assume that the FBI and other government agencies are competent. My baseline, starting assumption is that if everyone in the US was too scared to use programs like PRISM, they wouldn't have been built.
So these kinds of claims just don't make any sense in a world where we know that government has conducted surveillance without a warrant, and where we know that the FBI has built entire programs designed to make it easier for them to conduct surveillance without a warrant.
From the article posted that you're replying to:
> What Administration officials tend to obscure is that what they seek is not immunity for future cooperation with lawful surveillance, but rather telecom immunity for assisting with unlawful surveillance conducted from October 2001 through January 17, 2007, as part of the warrantless wiretap program initiated by the White House.
I'm not sure I understand what your implication is. I don't understand how it's possible to respond to an article that is about telecoms seeking immunity for previous unlawful actions by saying, "the government/businesses would be way too scared to do anything unlawful." I mean... obviously not, they sought immunity for it. They wouldn't just randomly do that, the most likely explanation is that they made immunity a pressing issue because they thought they needed it.
It does not seem to me that the optimistic world you describe and the observable actions and lobbying efforts of companies/administrations line up with each other.
Being charitable, let’s assume his friends work as homicide or theft detectives. If so, they need a high standard for admissible evidence to build their case.
If on the other hand his friends are street cops tasked with clearing a corner of drug dealers because some neighbor complained to their council person who complained to the police chief then those cops don’t necessarily care about extrajudicial activities.
Having been harassed by street cops and interacted with homicide detectives, I can tell you they vary tremendously in professionalism.
They definitely need a high standard for admissible evidence, that doesn't stop them from purchasing large amounts of data from all-too-willing communications companies and using parallel construction to build their case once they find out what happened via warantless spying.
They can also query these messages to see if there is something on the dealers they get paid from and then warn them if something comes up. It works both ways, no?
Let's be honest, how often do people share with their pals about how they commit crimes, or are less than scrupulous, at work, assuming their pals aren't criminals, as well? People tend to keep things like that a secret, even from people that are close to them.
And then when they get caught, they do this:
https://cdt.org/insights/the-truth-about-telecom-immunity/