“This was a little bit of an investigative lottery ticket when they had no other way of finding a suspect,” says Stanford law professor Orin Kerr, who has written extensively about searches.

“The big question is going to be how easy it is to game for internet providers,” says Stanford’s Professor Kerr, who filed a brief in the case siding with the government. “We’re in a computer world where so many of our records are stored remotely. Are all of our records protected? Every single thing we do? And if so, can that mean the government can never get a warrant for anything we do online?”