It makes me crazy that police in the U.S. nowadays can get a search warrant permitting seizure of large amounts of valuable computer and networking gear along with digital devices certain to massively disrupt anyone's life - only from buying things which are completely legal to buy and possess. Apparently all it takes is "a suspicious pattern of behaviors" to get a judge to issue an expansive warrant. The "suspicious pattern" is often defined ad hoc by police under no objective standard and never detailed in the warrant request. Judges are really failing in their duties because there are too many cases like this happening.
Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.
Depriving people of their valuable property for 8 months or more is also abusively punitive. In warrants that grant seizures of all or most digital devices, judges should require police to return the items within 30 days if they don't either file charges or go back to the judge with good cause for an extension. If police can't get around to actually looking at the evidence they claimed was so crucial in 30 days maybe it's not a high-priority crime. And if having a reasonable time limit makes it too hard to look through so much stuff, they're free to more narrowly tailor their seizure requests so they don't have so much to troll through.