Slashdot Mirror
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."
Using the exact setup from the case in question, if the cops had gone through the seized smartphone's call log and called back phone numbers offering drugs, that'd be on the "entrapment" side of it. I guess.
I suspect you never really know if it's officially entrapment until an judge says it is in the process of throwing out the case.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Entrapment is the FBI forcing you to buy drugs.
No, that's the old definition. I believe that's called SOP now.
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/5/15/121647/790
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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?
I must say, I find it slightly disturbing that there is no reasonable expectation that the owner of the phone is the one who will be reading my correspondence. What reasonable person does *not* expect someone to be in position of their own property? If it was not reasonable to believe the owner of a phone is the one holding it, why would we use such phones for communication?
:(){
And then they hold you in contempt of court until you turn it over.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/24/024233
The way I look at it, it's always been done: except in the past, they turned the actual guy, and he went from being a drug dealer to impersonating a drug dealer. Is it really that different that the person at the other end of the cell phone is now an actual cop impersonating a drug dealer? At the core, the drug buyer has been and is now dealing with a fraud - somebody who says they're a drug dealer, but isn't.
I really don't see how that is some new concept.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I believe that depends on what state you live in. I know for a fact that it is illegal to lie to police in the state of California. Especially if it hampers an investigation. That's why they tell you not to speak without a lawyer.
You can be held in contempt of court indefinitely without ever being accused of a crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
When I was a teenager a guy we all knew turned narc. He called me up and asked if I had any pot. I told him I had a tiny amount left and would smoke with him. He comes to my house and starts begging me to let him take some home. He tells me his stepfather is going to beat him unless he brings some home. After half an hour I get sick of this yoyo bugging me so I give him half a gram just so he'll get out of my house. He didn't even pay for it.
Fast forward a few months and I get pulled over and told I'm being charged with
-Possession with intent to distribute narcotics
-Sale and delivery of narcotics
-Maintaining a vehicle for the purpose of distributing narcotics
-Maintaining a dwelling for the purpose of distributing narcotics
-Conspiracy to distribute narcotics
On the (bad) advice of my lawyer I plead guilty to 3 out of 5 felonies.
Turns out this was part of our town police's two year long secret undercover investigation. Similar things happened to 8 of my friends, none of whom I would consider "drug dealers." Two years and who knows how much money spent, net result: a bunch of kids who could of had bright futures now with felonies on their records (since you're an adult at 16 in North Carolina).
This is the result of the war on drugs. Police departments need drug busts on a recurring basis to keep getting some of that sweet sweet federal drug enforcement money. What we end up with is a systematic campaign to label casual drug users (usually kids, they don't have the defensive paranoia older users have yet) as dealers and load them up with felonies.
Well, um, I've gone off on a bit of a rant, but the point (I think) was that I was guilty of simple possession, and I was entrapped into distribution that I otherwise was not interested in committing. I guess it's a but blurry considering I was willing to smoke with him... but either way claiming that I was maintaining my house and car for the purpose of conspiring to deal drugs is ludicrous.
TL;DR: A lot of cops suck, the drug war sucks, arresting kids sucks, and entrapment sucks. ;-)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Untrue, in Tennessee, my uncle drove by his mother's house to check to see that the property was being taken care of. He stopped at the stop sign as he was supposed to. A woman approached his car and asked him if he was looking for a date. His statement was "Get a real job" and he drove off. A few blocks later, several police vehicles pulled him over. He was arrested and charged with Soliciting Prostitution and his picture was published in the paper. He lost his job with the county and had to fight a 2 year court battle to have the charges dropped due to the Sheriff's department "misplacing" the A/V evidence. The judge dismissed his counter suit for damages.