Five Verbs: How to Read Everything on This Blog

Everything I write here hangs on five words. Learn them and you can read this whole blog: collect, analyze, copy, use, dispose.

The easiest way to see them is to follow a single object through its life. So let’s take one — the hard drive in a laptop sitting on an evidence table.

Collection – An agent takes the laptop under a warrant. This is the stage the Fourth Amendment is loudest about and the one courts understand best: was there probable cause, was the warrant particular in what crime had happened and what was to be seized, was the seizure reasonable. Most people think the legal story ends when the warrant is signed. It’s barely started.

Analysis – Back at the lab, an examiner opens the drive and runs tools across it — every file, every deleted fragment, every timestamp. Notice that no one got a second permission slip to *look*. The warrant authorized the taking. What governs the looking? Which files can the examiner open? What happens when a search for drug ledgers surfaces something else entirely? The statute is nearly silent here, and that silence is where a lot of injustice lives.

Copying – Before any of that analysis happens, the examiner makes a forensic image — a bit-for-bit clone of the entire drive. That clone includes everything, including the 95% of the drive that has nothing to do with the case. Here’s the question almost no law answers cleanly: once the case is over, how long does the government get to keep the clone?

Use – Say the analysis turns up evidence of a crime the warrant never mentioned. Can prosecutors use it? Charge it? The 1968 wiretap law actually anticipated this exact move and put a limit on it. Modern digital practice mostly forgot the lesson.

Disposition – The case ends. What happens to the drive, and to the image, and to every copy that got made along the way? Returned? Deleted? Quietly retained in case it’s useful someday? For most seized data, “someday” is the honest answer, and that should bother you.

Those five verbs are the spine of the model act I’m drafting here, and each one gets its own set of sections. Tuesdays, I’ll take them one at a time — first explaining the provision, then drafting the actual statutory text, then testing it against the hardest cases, then comparing how other systems handle it.

When you see a post here, ask yourself which verb it’s about. That’s the whole map.