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Government searching of email accounts predates the Obama administration, but Judge Facciola, a former state and federal prosecutor who has been reviewing warrants as a judge since 1997, said he was increasingly concerned about the breadth of government searches. He said he was also troubled by the fact that the Justice Department never said how long it planned to keep the seized data or whether it planned to destroy information that proved irrelevant to the case.
A decade ago, searches were more straightforward. If the authorities had evidence that someone was hiding drugs in a storage unit, for instance, prosecutors applied for a warrant so F.B.I. agents could open the unit, look through the contents and seize any drugs they found.
The Justice Department, however, does not treat email accounts like storage units. Prosecutors asked Judge Facciola for the authority to take everything in the account and search it for evidence of wrongdoing. Even though the government would have everything, it only considered the evidence to be “seized.” The argument is similar to the Obama administration’s justification for collecting the phone records of every American: that the authorities do not know what is relevant until they have reviewed everything.
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shaun james bockert 