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Judge: Cops Can Impersonate Owner Of Seized Cell Phones
Aryden writes with news of a recent court decision in which a judge ruled it was acceptable for police to impersonate the owner of a cell phone they had seized, in order to extract information from the owner's friends. The ruling stems from an incident in 2009 when police officers seized the iPhone of a suspected drug dealer, then used text messages to set up a meeting with another person seeking drugs.
"'There is no long history and tradition of strict legislative protection of a text message sent to, displayed, and received from its intended destination, another person's iPhone,' Penoyar wrote in his decision. He pointed to a 1990 case in which the police seized a suspected drug dealer's pager as an example. The officers observed which phone numbers appeared on the pager, called those numbers back, and arranged fake drug purchases with the people on the other end of the line. A federal appeals court held that the pager owner's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were not violated because the pager is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers,' akin to an address book. The court also held that someone who sends his phone number to a pager has no reasonable expectation of privacy because he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner. Judge Penoyar said that the same reasoning applies to text messages sent to an iPhone. While text messages may be legally protected in transit, he argued that they lose privacy protections once they have been delivered to a target device in the hands of the police."
Are you talking about this comic strip?
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-was-entrapped
If you think Bait Car is illegal you've got a pretty bizarre and incorrect view of our legal system.
Bait Car simply sets up a situation where someone who wants to steal a car can do so with the bonus that they get cameras, remote kill switch et al with that car. Bait Car is pretty cut and dried -- it's not even close to impersonating a drug dealer which might entice someone to buy drugs that maybe wouldn't have otherwise. Law abiding folks will walk by a Bait Car and do nothing to take advantage of it. Those who decide to steal it know they are breaking the law (watch how they glance around furtively and sometimes case the car and surrounding environment before getting in and stealing it if you doubt this).
Suppose Bait Car didn't leave the door unlocked or a nice pair of sunglasses on the center console and someone took a crowbar, smashed the window, hot wired the car, and drove it off. Would you think that would still make the "sting" illegal? Obviously not, but how is this different than what they actually do? Private citizens leave their car doors unlocked all the time and leave things of value in the car all the time and only criminals exploit this. The Bait Cars are not unusual in any way that would particularly entice a criminal to steal them vs. a private citizen's car which had been left unlocked.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Sting: FBI tells you where they'll have drugs, you show up and offer money for drugs, you get arrested.
Entrapment: FBI shows up at your house, hands you an unlabeled opaque bag, and as soon as you have it in your hand, arrests you for drug possession.