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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
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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 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?
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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
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.
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