SFGate: Magistrate waxes poetic while rejecting Gmail search request by Henry K. Lee

SFGate: Magistrate waxes poetic while rejecting Gmail search request by Henry K. Lee

SAN JOSE — A federal magistrate on Friday rejected a bid by prosecutors to search an unidentified target’s Google e-mail account, criticizing the “seize first, search second” request as overbroad and unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. Magistrate Paul Grewal could have simply denied the request in a stark order without preamble or explanation.

Instead, Grewal waxed poetic, beginning his seven-page ruling by painting a portrait of how each day he “joins the teeming masses of the Bay Area on Highway 101 or 280,” marked by “lengthy queues” at exits in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino. “The Technorati are, in short, everywhere” in Silicon Valley, from the “humble downtown San Jose taqueria” to the “overpriced Palo Alto cafe,” he said.

Grewal said he was hammering home a point, that “too few understand, or even suspect, the essential role played by many of these workers and their employers in facilitating most government access to private citizens’ data.”