Does a search warrant for your house give the police the right to search your car, if they found your car keys in your house? What about your neighbour's or your employer's car - perhaps on the other side of the world - if you happened to have those keys? To compel you not to tell your employer to change the locks, so the seized keys won't work?

These seem like closer real-world analogies for what exactly a warrant to search someone's computer should entitle the police to do.

Not necessarily. Depending on how the org's set up, the system may be permissioned to access too much stuff. I think justice systems should lean less on a general warrant - too much of a fishing expedition - and instead focus on subpoenas specifically related to their area of investigation. E.g. if they seize the CEO's computer on accounting or tax concerns, I sincerely doubt they showed a judge probable cause to seize, I don't know, new product designs. As such they should not be able to access them.

let me just extrapolate this out a bit for you. I live in the US (yes I visited France once long ago, it was nice). I use Uber. My phone is an Android phone running Uber's app.

Can a French prosecutor use Uber's systems to deliver a malicious payload to my phone to gather evidence? If so, is Uber required to assist them in this task?

Wasn't half of the concern with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht figuring when they could get him with his computer unlocked, without time to lock/wipe it? They'd have a pretty hard time proving destruction of evidence if 1. they didn't know for sure evidence was on that specific computer and 2. it was destroyed rather than just that the decryption key was removed from memory.

Regardless, the government violating an individual's rights doesn't mean we should yell at uber, it means we should yell at the government.

> I have a feeling it may be extremely hard to prosecute for something more substantial than a fine low enough for a french exec have it a as a guaranteed expense

I know nothing about French law, but this whole thing gives me “organised crime” vibes. In many jurisdictions the punishment dramatically increases when a crime is commited as an organised group whose purpose is to commit said crime. As i said i know nothing about French law so i don’t know if the same concept is present there, let alone if the letter of the law would fit the situation.

But yeah i agree with you they won’t care unless they are sitting in a cell with the chance of sitting a lot more in a cell.