We had a case in Germany some time ago where police caught a child porn seller and wanted to find the buyers.
The reaction in the usual circles was predictable: "All credit card users in Germany are under suspicion! Everyone is investigated!". Even lawyers close to certain political parties participated in that disinformation campaign.
What did the court order actually allow?
SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE recipient==$seller
The credit card company was ordered to give a list of people to the police who got charged a specific amount of money(!) by the known seller.
But since the database engine touches every record in the database it "logically" follows that everybody was searched...
A child-porn seller self-evidently deals in illegal material. What if they deal in other, non-child-porn material?
Cocaine? Ecstasy? Marijuana? Legal marijuana, in some jurisdictions? Fake/non-prescription Viagra? Hard-core/niche porn (e.g. watersports, which could be considered illegal in the UK [1], but is legal in a number of other countries)?
Is it justified, that everyone involved in non-child-porn (and potentially legal) purchases, is caught up in the same dragnet?
This is the inevitable result of overly-broad fishing expeditions.
>But since the database engine touches every record in the database it "logically" follows that everybody was searched...
Not sure why "logically" is in quotes, because it is both technically and logically true that they were searched.
If it is illegal for a person to manually parse thru the private information (i.e. financial transactions, search history) of millions of innocent people, then why should it be legal when a person uses a more automated (and thus more dangerous) means to do so?
We had a case in Germany some time ago where police caught a child porn seller and wanted to find the buyers.
The reaction in the usual circles was predictable: "All credit card users in Germany are under suspicion! Everyone is investigated!". Even lawyers close to certain political parties participated in that disinformation campaign.
What did the court order actually allow?
SELECT * FROM transactions WHERE recipient==$seller
The credit card company was ordered to give a list of people to the police who got charged a specific amount of money(!) by the known seller.
But since the database engine touches every record in the database it "logically" follows that everybody was searched...