Breaking into your computer is about as objectionable as breaking into your home. If they had enough evidence ex ante to merit breaking into his home or his data, then they should also have had enough to get the French police to break into his home and make copies of his hard drives.

If they didn't have enough evidence to convince the French to break into his home and his computers, then they were effectively breaking in and then making up charges based on what they happened to find. That is a very objectionable practice: Any house you go through with a sufficiently fine-toothed comb will contain sufficient illegalities to retroactively justify breaking in.

But of course even that isn't what they did here. What they did here was to break into a whole apartment bloc, rummage through every apartment in the bloc, and then break the door locks on the way out. Without telling anybody that they had done it, or, as far as can be determined from available evidence, intending to notify any of the residents that they might want to check their locks once the operation was over.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that doesn't produce megaton yields which would justify that sort of dragnet operation.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.