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Police Can Search Cell Phones Without Warrants
Hugh Pickens writes "The California Supreme Court has ruled 5 to 2 to allow police to search arrestees' cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they're carrying when taken into custody. Under US Supreme Court precedents, 'this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee's body... but also to open and examine what they find,' the state court said. The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data and that the decision allows police 'to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person.' Interestingly enough, the Ohio Supreme Court reached an opposite conclusion in a December 2009 ruling that police had violated drug defendants' rights by searching their cell phones after their arrests. The Ohio-California split could prompt the US Supreme Court to take up the issue, says California Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson, who represented the prosecution in the case."
It won't be long before we see another court case concerning a defendant's right not to disclose his whole disk encryption passphrase.
Palm trees and 8
What if my device is password protected? Can I be compelled to hand over the password? Because I won't.
What do they need the password for? They don't want to use the thing, they want the data. As long as you don't have your data encrypted having the device is more than enough for them, no password needed.
What if you store everything on the net?
Then you forfeit your rights whether or not you are arrested.
Palm trees and 8
You can be compelled to hand over a password, but it requires a court order. However, in the case of having your phone taken when you are arrested, the police don't need your password to see your data if it is unencrypted. They'll just read the phone memory with another device.
Generally, it's easy for the police to seize your property, relatively risk-free for them to damage it, and difficult for you to get it back in a timely fashion.
You can thank the drug war.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
of what the TSA was able to do.
You know some of the rights you still have? Enjoy them while they last. They WILL be taken away from you. And for those who tell you to contact your representatives or vote differently: those are the exact same people who voted for this.
What is needed is actual use of the 2nd amendment and trow all politicians out and start over. The first time it worked. The government was disliked and was thrown out.
I know it won't happen. Not until it is too late. It has happened before (also in other countries) and it will happen again (also in the USofA).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Even if it is backdoored, it probably isn't going to hurt you. If there is a secret backdoor in blackberries, AES encryption, etc, then the government isn't going to piss away that secret in order to bust some drug dealer or guy trading child porn. A backdoor like that would only be used in cases where you wanted to keep its existance secret, such a national security / espionage operations.
What really strikes me as profoundly stupid about the whole "warrantless" business is the fact that warrants are not hard to get. If someone's arrested for possession (which is the sort of thing TFA is referring to) it should be trivially easy to get a warrant from a judge to search the individuals home, car, cell, computer, whatever. Making it warrantless means that the cops can go "fishing" for evidence of a crime when the bring someone in on a trivial charge, like traffic violations.
Put another way, if the cops actually have good reasons for pulling data off a cell, the existing legal framework will let them do that easily. And if they don't have good enough reasons to go before a judge, why on earth should they be allowed to proceed?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
For recent examples I blame 24 and Law and Order: SVU for convincing the masses that extraordinary ticking time bomb and [insert trendy 'vulnerable' group here] in imminent peril from evil mastermind [murderer|rapist|deviant] scenarios are very ordinary. People think this so to get [re-]elected politicians show how tough on crime they are by cutting the 'red tape' that 'protects' the criminals.
Probable cause? Like arresting you for resisting arrest?
You can be taken into custody and held without charge for what, up to 48 hours? And there are enough laws out there that they could probably arrest you at any time for a number of things. So they can seize and search your phone, laptop, and any other possessions you have at any time, all without a warrant, should they decide that you're worthy of investigation. All they have to do is come up with some reason to arrest you. Like maybe for sneezing too loud in public.
Because as bad as police can be, the alternative (not having them) is much worse.
I'm not entirely sure how you get from my statement that police should not employ selective enforcement as a means to arbitrary powers of search and seizure to the conclusion that I believe the police should be disbanded.
Perhaps you've been (mis)led to believe that it is impossible to criticize someone or something you generally endorse? Is unconditional support (or, conversely, absolute rejection) the only possible response to all the actions of police -- or of politicians, or lawyers, or judges, or reporters, or doctors, or priests? Surely we're capable of more nuanced analysis. "Either you're with us or you're against us!" is a cheap rhetorical trick that works well in televised soundbites, but has no place is rational debate.
~Idarubicin