I can't tell what my 2028 model Foo Corp. Smart TV is sending to the HBO servers or why, it's technically impossible thanks to cryptography.

But a Federal Prosecutor can tell a judge these are the only Smart TVs that do that, and he thinks it's because they're violating the Tialaramex No Snooping Act of 2025, so he wants a warrant to see what HBO receives.

The warrant doesn't magically decrypt the packets - but refusing to obey the warrant is contempt of court, for which you can go to jail. An HBO employee shows the Prosecutor their database labelled "snooping" full of data from Foo Corp TVs that sure enough violates the No Snooping Act.

In your utopian vision corporate executives actually face jail time for violating the law, that if anything seems a more difficult thing to accomplish today.

Don't you need probable cause to get a warrant? This might be different in Europe actually... but it seems a bit thin.

Sure, so it depends on circumstances in the broader society. The judge needs to be convinced that on balance it's more likely the case that the prosecutor is right than not. That's all probable cause is.

In today's IoT world where basically everybody does all this potentially shady stuff sending encrypted data to who knows where, and with no legislation on the books saying they mustn't, you would not get anywhere trying to obtain a warrant.

But if things like WebThings Gateway were to make that unusual, so that as I said there aren't other Smart TVs sending mysterious stuff directly to HBO - that changes the balance of probabilities, and it also changes the incentive to regulate / legislate behaviours that are now less common and still undesirable so that what they're doing isn't just immoral it's illegal too.

Circumstances change. In 1975 the idea that you shouldn't smoke cigarettes inside a train, deep under the ground, in a crowded city, was a bit weird. By 1983 it was illegal in London. In 1985 somebody who'd cut a few corners and was lighting a cigarette on the escalator out of the Underground caused a fire in which a lot of people died (a lot of other things went wrong, but none of them would have mattered if not for the cigarette). Today when we're trying to explain that fire to children it doesn't make a lot of sense to them. They don't remember it ever being legal to smoke cigarettes inside a building - it smells bad and looks obviously dangerous - why would somebody be doing it not just inside a building but so deep underground?

In Europe, with the GDPR, you can just ask the company what they have on you.

"Hey company in shenzen that i suspect is a shady front to illegal data mining business, do you have any data on me? i'm john doe, living at 123 naive st #42, phone number 555-555-555, national registry number 1234556. You can reply to me on this same email address. thank you. PS: maybe i filled this in an webform, so please do not attach this new info to all the traffic/behaviour you previously collected from your TV on this same IP address"