The heinousness of the crime does not justify giving up or overriding Constitutional freedoms. Never. Not ever.
And if anyone is in place to protect us from that level of overreach, it's a judge. I cannot believe he's pulling a "won't someone think of the children!" in justifying (and creating some janky circular logic) this ruling.
The scariest precedent here is the level of crime dictating the flexibility of constitutionality.
I think you're misreading it. He's not saying that the heinousness of the crime justifies it, he's saying that by accessing child porn from another country, the defendant opened himself to hacking risk and as such has no reasonable expectation of privacy.
An unlocked car (which is the closest legal analogy, I think) is a bad fit here. If we're really going to search for analogues let's pick one that really matches what's going on in digital communication: physical communication.
Whoever, without authority, opens, or destroys any mail
or package of newspapers not directed to him, shall be
fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one
year, or both. -- Title 18 ยง 1703(b)
What if the "computer" on the internet is my pacemaker, and it uploads a data stream to servers in, say, Dublin. Does that mean I should not have a reasonable expectation in the U.S. for privacy of that data? That kind of rationale is bad in principle and bad law.
If you're uploading information to a third party, you no longer have privacy rights under the third party doctrine. That's very well established precedent.
As I said in another comment here, the issue is when it goes beyond such information like IP addresses and goes to actually hacking, which involves running code on the victim's computer.
The heinousness of the crime does not justify giving up or overriding Constitutional freedoms. Never. Not ever.
And if anyone is in place to protect us from that level of overreach, it's a judge. I cannot believe he's pulling a "won't someone think of the children!" in justifying (and creating some janky circular logic) this ruling.
The scariest precedent here is the level of crime dictating the flexibility of constitutionality.