Slashdot Mirror
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.
They buy special devices that plug in to the manufacturer specific port and rip the data that way. They don't always use the screen and keypad but rather swipe all the data at once and review it in the privacy of their office while laughing at your photos.
Better idea would be to hollow out part of the phone without stopping it from working and rewire the port to discharge a capacitor that hopefully ruins their machine.
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
Fight Spammers!
iPad or laptop?
What if your device contains attorney-client privileged material or other sensitive documents?
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
I don't know Floridian law, but does the box have to be open? If that's the case, a pass-coded cellphone is technically a sealed box.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
They get a very sanitized version of the phone, you get to keep your privacy - all while complying with their order.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Here's a link to the actual opinion: http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-phonesearch.pdf
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.
That doesn't always help - they may search it illegally, or (as Shaun Martin argues) invent a completely fake excuse to allow them to search it. In this case, it was a completely fake "drug tip". Also quite common is to call in the police dog, order the dog to false-alert when walking near the vehicle, and search based on that.
Now, you should still not give permission to search, that's absolutely true. But especially if you're not a straight clean-cut educated white guy, don't be all that surprised if they trample on your rights.
I am officially gone from
Also quite common is to call in the police dog, order the dog to false-alert when walking near the vehicle, and search based on that.
Now, you should still not give permission to search, that's absolutely true. But especially if you're not a straight clean-cut educated white guy, don't be all that surprised if they trample on your rights.
I'm a clean cut white guy and I've had the K-9 "alert" on my car and been searched twice, and no drugs were found either time.
I don't understand why the work of a DOG is enough to violate my rights. The dog will alert if the handler gives the command to alert. This isn't evidence and should be disallowed in court.
Cops LIE and courts need to become confortable with that fact. The "War on Drugs" has done more to damage our rights than the Patriot Act ever did.
So where do we get a cell phone with real encryption?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Now, you should still not give permission to search, that's absolutely true. But especially if you're not a straight clean-cut educated white guy, don't be all that surprised if they trample on your rights.
Or if you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"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.
Apparently, in the situation of this case, they did not need permission to search his car. They searched his car under the guise of doing an inventory of what was in it before they towed it so that they would know if anything was stolen at the impound yard. In this case, if he had given them permission to search his car, I would accept them searching his phone when they found it. Basically, one they started searching his car, each step along the way they found something that gave them probable cause to look more closely at other things they found. They found a gun positioned to be easily drawn and fired by the driver (I know several people who carry guns for self-defense, they rarely position the gun for "quick" draw, they generally expect that if they need the gun they will be in a situation that escalates slowly enough for them to access the gun from some place that is less than the optimal place to draw and fire). They then found drug paraphanalia. When they looked at the phone they found a wallpaper picture on the phone of a masked person resembling the driver brandishing two assault weapons.
However, I have a problem with their justification for searching the car in the first place.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So where do we get a cell phone with real encryption?
More to the point, why have some of us allowed ourselves to be duped into any expectation of privacy or security with a device that can be swiped from your pocket and scraped for data in moments?
Probably just about any of us could secure data on our laptop machines in such a way as to make unauthorised recovery at least challenging. But (for the moment, at least) a phone is, well, pretty much just a phone with a few doodads on it to give us something to do other than playing minesweeper. The pervasiveness of mobile handsets and applications has way outstripped their rudimentary little safeguards, and anyone who entrusts anything important to such a device most likely deserves a salutary shock.
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.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What we need is a websight where individuals can log every time a cop dog false alerts.
Then the land sharks can get the dogs disqualified as unreliable.
Those dogs cost $, once the cops have something to lose they will protect their dogs as police assets.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Not a sentence!
The thing is, traffic stop law was "settled" by people acting in violation of the solemn oaths that give them the right to perform their jobs. If you accept that the judiciary has legitimate article five powers (meaning, they can redefine the 4th amendment as convenient for them), you're specifically saying that the constitution is no more than irrelevant paper.
Because according to the constitution, they are authorized no such thing. Are we a constitutionally limited democratic republic? Or are we a country run at the arbitrary, unlimited whims of 445 "royals"?
IMHO, The biggest mistake ever made in this country was to assume that government members would consider themselves bound by oath; the second biggest was not to provide strict punishment for violating that oath.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.