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."

Comments

Not shocking.

[masternerdguy]

I always assumed they would do this.

Re:Not shocking.

[rtb61]

Wrong this is a criminal act. A seized phone of a suspect, let me remind you again, 'SUSPECT', is the property of that 'SUSPECT', capitalising to be shore you don't miss it and the police have no right to make it appear to people that the suspect is carrying out acts. This places of the burden of those acts upon the suspect and of course all associates of the suspect and can have extremely dangerous results for the suspect and their associates.

For example say a drug deal was trigger using the 'suspect's identity. The drug deal goes down people are arrested and associates of the people arrested go the suspect house and murder the suspects family. Apparently those people are nothing, simply meh, they deserve to die for being related to a suspect.

The police have not right to associate a person with an act they did not commit. Just as nobody has the right to do that. It is a sickly cowardly act and presume a person guilty until proven innocent and all associates of that person also guilty by association. Face it the Judge was a 'Shithead' first class and utterly failed to differentiate between a suspect and a person found guilty in a court of law as well as of course the risk by association placed upon others in the community.

Re:Hit me

[masternerdguy]

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.

Re:True story...

[Lehk228]

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.