It's not a perfect comparison, I agree. Probably I shouldn't have mentioned your house. It's more like the police getting a warrant to search a company's premises.
My thought process went a little like this...
Presumably the police could apply for a warrant to search RIM's premises for something along the lines of "records of messages used to organise a riot"? If they got that warrant, then they could go to the physical servers and search for the relevant data on site? AFAIK that's a perfectly feasible scenario and completely within the law - even though RIM haven't committed any crimes, I think they can still be the subject of a warrant. I'd guess something similar would happen in cases of fraud.
And if they can do that, then they could also ask RIM for permission to do it without a warrant. Which RIM might agree to if they believe that the police would get the warrant anyway.
And if they can do that, then it doesn't sound much worse to give the records to the police for them to search through using their own computer systems instead of going and searching directly on RIM's servers.
nodata|14 years ago
(and I think I'm right in saying that the courts were't even involved, so the warrant part doesn't work either)
stoney|14 years ago
My thought process went a little like this...
Presumably the police could apply for a warrant to search RIM's premises for something along the lines of "records of messages used to organise a riot"? If they got that warrant, then they could go to the physical servers and search for the relevant data on site? AFAIK that's a perfectly feasible scenario and completely within the law - even though RIM haven't committed any crimes, I think they can still be the subject of a warrant. I'd guess something similar would happen in cases of fraud.
And if they can do that, then they could also ask RIM for permission to do it without a warrant. Which RIM might agree to if they believe that the police would get the warrant anyway.
And if they can do that, then it doesn't sound much worse to give the records to the police for them to search through using their own computer systems instead of going and searching directly on RIM's servers.