Two American heroes: Judges Paul Grewal and John Facciola

Eric Holder's Justice Department is once again grossly overreaching in their attempts to seize just about any electronic information on average Americans.  Fortunately for us citizens, several judges have become wise to their crimes, and are refusing to issue warrants without clear good cause.  Thank goodness there are still a few who know their job is to protect the people, and to keep the meaning in the Fourth Amendment.

Via Techdirt:

 "As we covered recently, a couple of magistrate judges (Judge John Facciola and Judge David Waxse) have started pushing back against the government's broad warrant requests for electronic data. Facciola has now twice sent the government back to rewrite its warrant requests, once in relation to a seized iPhone and another dealing with a person's Gmail account. In the latter, Facciola stated the following:

[T]he government continues to submit overly broad warrants and makes no effort to balance the law enforcement interests against the obvious expectation of privacy e-mail account holders have in their communications.

The government apparently decided that rather than narrow its request, it would just ask another judge. It took this warrant request all the way across the nation to another magistrate judge in California, hoping to get the rubber stamp it couldn't coax out of the Washington, DC court. Judge Paul Grewal of California's Northern District has just joined Facciola in rejecting the request as being overly broad. He attacks the government's wish to "seize first, search later" approach as inappropriate for the securing of data stored by third parties, which face none of the limitations inherent to searching a computer on site.

The court is nevertheless unpersuaded that the particular seize first, search second proposed here is reasonable in the Fourth Amendment sense of the word. On past occasions, the government at least submitted a date restriction. Here, there is no date restriction of any kind. The activity described in the application began in 2010; Gmail has been broadly available since 2007 and in beta release "since 2004." Nor has the government made any kind of commitment to return or destroy evidence that is not relevant to its investigation. This unrestricted right to retain and use every bit Google coughs up undermines the entire effort the application otherwise makes to limit the obvious impact under the plain view doctrine of providing such unfettered government access."