Horribly guilty drug lords using the proceeds of crime to fight on a piece of evidence on a technicality is what this looks like.
Difficult to see why it would be inadmissible tbh
Yeah the article seems to imply that using a honeypot to entrap criminals is somehow inadmissible but does not give any details to why it could be.
EDIT:
After a bit of a Googling about the case it looks like the issue is over the extra info gathered when the messages were duplicated.
Additional information, including geolocation data, was also added to the duplicated messages as the users pressed send, but not to the original texts, the court heard on Monday.
Reminds me with the case of the guy known as “Doingfedtime”. USPS broke the law and opened the packages sent by him, so used that to his advantage, Mind that he was actually dedicated to it, and not an easy thing to pull off.
Late to this sorry if annoying, saw this when I joined this thing looking for something else.
So this was a legal issue about whether the evidence was obtained from the iBot server or whether it involved interception of communications passing over a telecoms system which is unlawful under s 7 of the TIAA.
Several alleged offenders appealed on inadmissibility claiming it was intercepted. This went to one state’s Supreme Court of Appeal. From reading the transcript we got to experience metaphors from experts like the network being a pipe with water in it, walking through a door and locking it, a running track waiting for a runner and built up lego blocks.
Those experts actually did a great job lol. Unfortunately did still result in a judge at some point later saying something along the lines of “did they press the send button or not though”. But yeah there very clearly appeared to be a very problematic fuck up here by the cops that looked like unlawful interception not obtaining it from the server, which would have made all the evidence inadmissible. Somehow the court agreed with the DPP while leaving some pretty pertinent questions in a specific legal category of being reserved because they know whats good for them and their reputation.
This case was at the stage of being granted special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia end of last year. Which technically means it is before the High Court which is very important for some basic legal principles in what came next. Shortly after literally a week or so, very end of 2024, the Cth passed legislation with the purpose formally recorded as “Provide that information or a record obtained under specified warrants was not intercepted while passing over a telecommunications system and was lawfully obtained under those warrants.”
https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00130/asmade/text
This had the effect of technically negating the basis for the case before the High Court by retroactively validating the evidence. Im just glad I don’t teach undergrads anymore because that would have been hard to respond to a question on without admitting everything is a lie and nothing has any meaning anymore lol.
There was almost no reporting on this because the media is owned by maybe 3 ppl. But it was definitely a new low for us imho, one that had me thinking maybe other countries might have some skilled visas I could look into lol. But nah love a lot of things about it here, but the privacy space amongst a few other legal issues that are deeply linked to some other pretty fucking fundamental rights we think we have, its moved into an outrageous space last few years, what in the fuck is going on and why does no one care lol
Because whether these people may or may not have been look obviously very fucking guilty, that is totally irrelevant. Someone just passed legislation that both interfered with a fair trial to the point of ending a case before the high court. As well as used legislation to make inadmissible evidence fine to use against them as basically the base of what they even had as evidence in a pretty serious criminal trial. Legal technicalities get such a bad rep but they are so important, especially when its about the ppl you want to lock up the most, otherwise the system has no legitimacy.
The broader issue is theres a cross-jurisdictional way using treaties, police to police assistance and few other legal mechanisms that allows other countries Australia is friendly with, to essentially piggy back off this set up we have going on here. To target their own citizens in their own country in many ways that is unlawful under their domestic law as a work around to evade it but I shouldn’t rant on.