alt Hacker News> "And what if something turns up which would retroactively justify it?"
US constitutional law prohibits the introduction of evidence obtained illegally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule ("Exclusionary rule")
There's no "retroactive" exception. The core point of this rule is to deter police from intentionally violating people's rights, under the expectation that what they find will, "retroactively", vindicate them. Won't work.
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Constitutional law doesn't mean anything when the authorities don't respect it. Constitutional law won't stop you from being arrested or killed if you don't fully submit to an authoritarian government.
There were laws in Germany to prevent what Hitler did. It still happened.
See also: parallel construction, which has come up (rightfully so) in HN threads about dragnet surveillance.
> Won’t work.
How would you know when it did? You can’t “retroactively” justify an arbitrary search under the exclusionary rule, but this doesn’t exclude evidence tangential to a legally-executed warrant during the execution of that warrant. For example, suppose someone is suspected of illegally possessing wildlife. A search warrant is issued on the residence. No wildlife is found, and in fact no wildlife was ever on the premises. If officers find large quantities of cocaine during the search, they aren’t precluded from making an arrest, because the warrant used to gain entry and conduct the search was legal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction