
Judge grants search warrant for Cambridge Analytica's offices - b5
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/23/judge-grants-search-warrant-for-cambridge-analyticas-offices
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dTal
Is there any reason to believe this isn't completely too late? 24 hours after
the ICO announced she was _seeking_ a warrant, crates of documents were
observed being unloaded from Cambridge Analytica's building. The offices
weren't actually raided for an entire working week! Surely, with that kind of
notice, they'd be idiots to leave anything incriminating lying around?

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88
Most of the relevant information will be in digital form, and it would be
quite difficult to destroy that evidence without a trace.

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laythea
Why was facebook in the offices the very night this story broke then?

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jasonjei
How useful is a physical search warrant when much information is stored in the
cloud? Wouldn’t it be more useful to procure one for the cloud providers the
company uses?

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AlexCoventry
Also, CA has had days of warning that this search is coming. Plenty of time to
clean up.

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mschuster91
If such a clean-up leaves even the tiniest trace and the investigators are
worth their salt, this will land people in jail for obstruction of justice.
Doubt anyone wants to risk jail time in their already pretty screwed
situation.

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dragonwriter
Obstruction of justice can be less bad for you than the offense concealed, so
if the offense is bad enough, risking punishment for that may not be
irrational if it offers a real chance of concealing another offense.

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ggg9990
The thing is that once you get to criminal charges, everyone is looking out
just for his own head. The IT guy who will be asked to delete files couldn’t
be gotten on election tampering, so he’s not going to commit obstruction of
justice. And if you delete files such that the files are gone but the fact
that you deleted them remains, then the government can implicate you for
literally anything, so unless it was the worst of the worst crimes like child
sex trafficking you’re probably better off pleading guilty to the offense.

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pyjammas
If I were in charge of company that does what CA does, I'd specifically hire
'IT guys' that I have dirt on that is worse than any of this... Or I'd find
dirt on people that my IT guy cares about.

I might be giving CA more credit than they're due in the smarts department,
but considering that I'm just a dude making up scenarios, I find this
particular one pretty plausible. And assuming the worst seems like a sensible
approach in this case.

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marklyon
Which specific law does "the use of personal data and analytics for political
purposes" violate?

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parenthephobia
None, intrinsically.

But, receiving, storing, and/or processing personal data _without consent_ is,
in most situations, likely to be against the the Privacy and Electronic
Communication Regulations and the Data Protection Act. Additionally,
information about political affiliation.

The key point in this case is that CA didn't have consent. CA don't dispute
this, but say that they believed at the time that they did. It _is_ a defence
to show that you "exercised all due diligence" in complying.

ICO will be looking for not only evidence of the actual use of personal data,
but also evidence regarding whether and to what extent CA were knowingly or
recklessly non-compliant.

