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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."
I always assumed they would do this.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Entrapment is the FBI forcing you to buy drugs. It is not entrapment if the FBI catches you attempting to buy drugs. This is why sting operations work. In a sting someone pretends to be offering %illegalstuff% and they wait for customers, who are then arrested. The logic is that the person arrested was attempting to commit a crime and would have done so even without FBI intervention.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
In criminal law, entrapment is conduct by a law enforcement agent inducing (not forcing) a person to commit an offense that the person would otherwise have been unlikely to commit. So maybe not entrapment in this case, as the suspects might have bought the drugs anyway.
However, false flag operations clearly fit the description of entrapment.
http://chasvoice.blogspot.com/2012/05/fbi-again-foils-their-own-false-flag.html
http://aluminumchristmastree.blogspot.com/2012/04/breaking-news-fbi-false-flag-bombing.html
http://www.dailypaul.com/234963/fbi-again-foils-their-own-false-flag-terror-plot
http://www.infowars.com/fbi-nabs-five-mastermind-geniuses-after-teaching-them-how-to-blow-up-a-bridge-in-cleveland/
As a sender of a message I regard the message to be in transition until it reaches the recipient *I* intended. Therefore it should be treated as the interception of a message in transit when the wrong person reads of an end device which is not hers.
They didn't forget to take the drugs/pipes. They correctly recognized that if they took the drugs they had to charge someone with possessing them, if they charged someone with posessing them that person would be banned from getting financial aid for school. The cops made the choice to be decent about it and handle the noise complaint without ruining anyone's life. Kudos to those officers.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I guess I can see that, once you add "exclusive".
After all, I reasonably expect people to be in possession of their own property, for instance their car. So if I see my wife's car in a parking lot, I would reasonably expect my wife to be somewhere nearby. However, I wouldn't find it unreasonable if instead I found, say, my mother-in-law nearby, because it's reasonable for her to let her mother drive her car.
Still, it feels almost like splitting hairs. After all, I would not reasonably expect a stranger to be driving her car; the only reason my mother-in-law wouldn't be unreasonable is because she's immediate family.
In that sense, I might not expect the intended person to be the exclusive recipient, but I would expect to know all potential recipients (e.g. if I send a message to my buddy, I could reasonably expect his wife to read the message, but I wouldn't reasonably expect his neighbor to be reading it).
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"Couldn't the same also be said about snail mail - that you have no reasonable expectation that the envelope will be opened by the recipient?"
Actually it's a federal crime to read someone elses mail. That's the example that should have been used as mail, pagers, phones, internet, actually are just communications channels protected under the 4th amendment privacy references and later court decisions. In deference to recent court decisions, the general public has every right to expect that private information sent via private and public channels is theirs and the recipients only. The laws protecting users of the US mail and phone services are proof of that view. Once that view breaks down those systems that help to bind us fall into disuse and trust falls by the wayside along with national stability.
The drug dealer was arrested, which is just active accusation not conviction. His rights to his phone are supposed to be there until convicted, until then the police using his phone without his permission violated his civil rights. Police and government don't like it, rewrite the constitution and various court decisions protecting privacy and take responsibility for the resulting war that follows.
Yes, it could have been stolen. However, to say that something is not impossible is not to say that something is reasonable. The crux of the matter is that I have a reasonable expectation that a phone will not be stolen when I send a communication to it. After all, if the phone was stolen, a reasonable person would report it stolen promptly, and the service would be shut off, thereby removing the ability of the thief to read the contents of any message I send to the phone. With the advent of remote wipe abilities, you could also try to make the argument that a reasonable person would have all the info from a stolen phone remotely wiped, therefore denying access to even previously successful communications with the intended recipient.
However, I am drawn back to the snail mail analogy again. It's always been the case that someone could take the mail directly from your mailbox. However, this expectation is unreasonable because taking someone else's mail is illegal. In the same token, stealing someone's personal property is also illegal.
So, again, if you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy because the recipient's phone could be stolen, why would you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when sending snail mail?
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There is a big difference between the actions of one “rogue agent” and SOP for the DEA. Panting an entire organization with the actions of a few in invalid in any circumstances.