Calif. Appeals Court Approves Cell Phone Searches

Local ID10T writes with this excerpt from The Blaze: "In a case explicitly decided to set a precedent, the California Appellate court has determined police officers can rifle through your cellphone during a traffic violation stop. ... Florida and Georgia are among the states that give no protection to a phone during a search. In particular, Florida law treats a smartphone as a 'container' for the purposes of a search, similar to say a cardboard box open on the passenger seat, despite the thousands of personal emails, contacts, and photos a phone can carry stretching back years. But after initially striking down cell phone snooping, California has now joined the list of states that allow cops to go through your phone without a warrant." Interesting additional commentary, too, from UCSD law professor Shaun Martin.

Comments

This ruling does not last long.

[www.sorehands.com]

As a result of the Court's ruling, the legislature overruled the court by passing a law that provides privacy protection for mobile devices.

See http://www.californiality.com/2011/09/california-mobile-device-privacy-law.html

Opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link to the actual opinion: http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-phonesearch.pdf

Re:Passcode

[hypergreatthing]

They don't manually go through it. There are devices they plug into the usb/charger port if it's a smartphone and will download everything to the device. Doesn't matter if you have a password. More info here:
http://www.cellebrite.com/forensic-products/forensic-products.html?loc=seg
Of course they'll keep the info, store it in their databases forever. Goodbye privacy.

welcome to the living Constitution

[Anonymous Coward]

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

If this doesn't cover a cell phone carried on your person, it doesn't cover anything. We should really be more careful when we choose judges. We need to make sure they all know how to read.

car towed out of concern for car -- yeah, right!

[whoever57]

With Reid under arrest and handcuffed in the patrol car, Deputy Ryan decided to have Reid's Acura towed. Reid had wanted Deputy Ryan to leave the Acura on the side of the road or to drive the vehicle to his house, which was a half mile up the road. ...... Deputy Ryan's decision to take the vehicle into safekeeping was based on his concern that leaving the car on the side of the road would expose it to possible vehicular theft or burglary since it was nighttime,

The reason it was towed was concern that it might be stolen if left by the side of the road. Yeah, right. I am sure that the "concern" was totally unrelated to the fact that towing the car created a situation under which it could be searched.

Re:Passcode

[DMUTPeregrine]

LUKS Manager for Android lets you create encrypted volumes, similar to TrueCrypt. TextSecure encrypts incoming text messages. There is not yet a way to do full disk encryption that I know of.