Why is secrecy of correspondence treated differently than telephone or electronic surveillance According to wikipedia &quot;secrecy of correspondence&quot; &quot;Paper letters have, in most jurisdictions, remained outside the legal scope of law enforcement surveillance, even in cases of &quot;reasonable searches and seizures&quot;. &quot; Why is communication with letters treated differently than communication by other means?
They aren’t treated differently In most jurisdictions, law enforcement requires a warrant to intercept/open/read the contents of physical or electronic correspondence. Similarly, in most jurisdictions, a warrant is not required to read the metadata: who is communicating with whom, how and when but not what. That is they can read what’s written on the outside of the envelope or the routing information of the email/SMS. Telephony is not correspondence because it is not the intent of the parties to create a permanent record. It is usually treated as any other conversation - if it carried out in a place and manner that the participants have a reasonable expectation of privacy it’s usually illegal to record it (electronically or by writing it down). If it’s said publicly, it isn’t illegal.
Assuming that the police have a warrant to seize your cell phone, the scope of what can be seized is specified in the warrant. It is not automatic that seizing a phone entails seizure of some or all online accounts (e.g. automatic backups, collections of passwords in a Google account) and it does not automatically &quot;freeze&quot; or block a person's access to their accounts including phone accounts. It's not that it is impossible to seize an account, it's that it is not automatic: it has to be in the scope of the warrant. Here is a collection of petition templates, asking the court to allow the seizure of various things for various reasons (mostly electronic), including access to bank accounts. If the police suspect that information might be available online after it has been deleted from a phone, they would need to include online accounts in the scope of the petition(s). There is even a template for &quot;give me everything&quot;, called &quot;Frankenstein&quot;.
Any written communication is generally admissible Subject to all the normal rules for admissibility of course. For texts between you and a third party the major issue that springs to mind is relevance. As in, how are they relevant to the dispute between you and this man? If they are not, your lawyer should have objected to them on this basis, however, its too late now. I'm curious as to how he obtained these and whether it was done legally or not. Illegality will not affect their admissibility as the exclusionary rule doesn't apply to civil matters, however, it does speak to the gentleman's character.
Yes and No See Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967): What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected. The glass has clearly been "knowingly exposed" and if that glass was, on the normal methods of examination by the officer (sight, smell etc.), evidence of a crime then it would be able to be used as evidence. However, any DNA on that glass is not "knowingly exposed" - finding the DNA requires a laboratory, specialised equipment and trained technicians.
Police are not required to “look into” any report What the police choose to investigate is solely at their discretion irrespective of the number or quality of reports on the matter. You do not have to give your name You can report anonymously if you like. It does make investigation more difficult because the police cannot follow up for further information and may influence their decision on whether to investigate.
Such a search would have been emotionally satisfying for many people, but it would almost certainly not have been legal. Evidence that someone committed a crime is not always sufficient to permit a search of their home. An arrest warrant requires probable cause to believe the target individual committed an offense, and a search warrant requires probable cause to believe that the target location will have evidence of a crime. So whatever evidence they had that Epstein committed a crime, they would generally need a separate warrant to search his properties for evidence of that crime. There is no "emergency clause" for search warrants. I imagine you're thinking of the "exigency" exception to the requirement that the police obtain a warrant before searching property, which allows a search in cases where there is an actual emergency, where evidence is being destroyed, or when someone ducks into private property while officers are pursuing them. "Reasonable suspicicion of possible threats to ... potential victims" would not be enough to justify a search based on an exigency. If Epstein is already in jail, he doesn't really pose a threat to anyone, he isn't able to destroy any evidence, and no one is pursuing him anywhere.
Attorney-client privilege is normally waived if a privileged communication is voluntarily disclosed. Submission of an attorney-client privileged document to a judge to review in camera does not waive the attorney-client privilege. Most of the case law involves inadvertent "oops" style disclosures of attorney-client privileged documents (keep in mind that big lawsuits often involve exchanges of terabytes of data that have to be reviewed page by page for attorney-client privileged materials by armies of junior lawyers and paralegals, so mistakes are inevitably made now and then), which is a somewhat convoluted area of law. Basically, if it is caught soon enough, the person accidentally receiving it can be ordered to not look at it any more and to destroy it without keeping copies if it remains within an accidental recipient law firm or government agency's possession and has not been further disseminated into public records yet. In particular, such documents can't be presented as evidence at trial if the mistake is caught before it is too late to correct the mistake. In those cases, the legal system does its best to pretend that the mistaken disclosure of attorney-client privileged materials never happened.
It's just been answered by the Court of Appeal: BBC News, Encrochat: Secret network messages can be used in court, judges rule (5 February 2021) A, B, D &amp; C v Regina [2021] EWCA Crim 128 (5 February 2021) The rationale for the decision is: Interception of messages renders them unable to be used as evidence. But the Encrochat system used end to end encryption, and the captured messages were in plain text and not decrypted by authorities. Therefore the captured evidence data could not have arisen from &quot;interception&quot; of messages. They were not intercepted messages, but on-device captures of the phones memory/RAM prior to encryption and sending. Corroborating this, the court observed that the captures also apparently included device data that was not part of any transmitted message,showing again, they were not &quot;intercepted&quot; data. It appears it was captured by some kind of software introduced onto the phones by French authorities, perhaps with UK involvement its not clear to me.