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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.
I don't know much about entrapment but from what I *think* I know about it, I would say this sound entirely like that. Even if the "friend" came asking for the drugs, isn't this still a type of entrapment? Please kick me if I'm completely off on this.
Passwords! Passwords! Passwords!
sudo make me a sandwich
I'd love to hear them impersonating my accent... if it's a voice call. I'd like to know if they can use the same slang if they try to text people (which... I don't do much).
Isn't this pretty much already established? We already know it's a crime to lie to the police, but it's sanctioned behaviour for them to lie to the people under their protection. Wouldn't this be an extension of that? Really, they're lying about who they are to trick the populace into giving up information they would not otherwise share with the police.
Aren't they also asking you to surrender your password and access codes for phones, laptops, etc., whenever you board a plane, and have now extended that to searches of a vehicle, and in fact, they can now force you to reveal your password without charging you with any crime. So then they compel you to surrender your identity and equipment... and then use your identity and equipment to pretend to be you, in order to do the same to others.
Agent Smith, you have competition.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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?
:(){
Do police have the ability to sit in my house & use my number 555-0796 to pretend to be me to entrap my friends/colleagues?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
In my college days (read: drug experimentation days), we were at my friend's apartment waiting for two more friends to arrive for our "after hours" party (2:01 am, after the bars close). While packing a bowl, we had our back to the door and there was a knock. We knew our friends were coming and we assumed it was them. "COME ON IN" we said. In walked two police officers (called to our location for a noise complaint). They confiscated our drugs/paraphernalia and cited us for something (I forget the details...20 years later). I don't see using the cell phone as any different. Funny ending....when the officers left, they forgot to take the drugs/paraphernalia so we ended up getting high anyway (but WOW, what a buzz kill) :(
I can see that once the police had the phone, that looking at the address book is equivalent to looking at an old style rolodex. Looking at received texts is like the precedent cited of looking at received messages on an old style pager. But *sending* texts seems like something new. Are there precedents where a police officer who is a skilled voice mimic answers a seized phone, or starts making calls from a seized phone and impersonates the true owner of the phone?
To the fourth amendment - secure in your person, papers and things. A cell phone is definitely a thing. And without warrant and probable cause the police shouldn't be touching the phone. Use a secure lock code on your smartphone! You don't have to disclose it.
It's always been the case that someone could have lost their phone/pager, or had it stolen. Sure, in most cases the phone will be in the hands of the owner, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
With a pager it's pretty obvious, there is no security, your phone number just displays on the screen. So I think they're correct there. Similarly, with many dump phones an incoming text message just pops up on the screen.
Now in the case of a smartphone with a password then in my opinion you could reasonably argue that you would have a reasonable expectation of privacy sending information to it...but technically speaking I have no way of knowing what sort of phone the recipient is using when I send them a text. They could have broken their smartphone and temporarily gotten a dumb phone as a replacement.
This is news? Why would anyone expect our so-called "law enforcement" officers to be held to any standard of honesty or integrity nowadays?
Liberty in your lifetime
You would think that with the Miranda decision they would have to at least text you your rights.
If the police confiscate a judges phone can they impersonate the judge and lie to people? How about a doctor? I bet the judge would find a special reason that it's different for 'professionals' once he realized it could happen to him.
A few times when I was younger, I saw people had left their lights on and their doors unlocked. Rather than let the battery drain, I popped the door and flipped the lights off.
I wonder what the legal situation would be on that nowadays, especially with a "bait" vehicle.
the pager is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers,' akin to an address book.
If a phone is like a pager, then by this reasoning, opening your snail mail is fine, because an envelope is 'nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for street addresses, akin to an address book.' Note that the envelope contains the communication itself, which is protected. That in itself should preclude responding to the letter by a police impostor. The cell phone also contains protected communication, and that in itself should also preclude the spoofing.
In the absence of RTFA, this sounds like soviet-style rubbish.
I'd imagine anything with a corporate account has separate rules. Plus anyways, with our corporate stuff... the instant someone is terminated or the device is stolen/lost, we start executing a wipe on their device. Not much for the cops to do with it at that point.
You'll end up calling my mom, wife, dad, or sister. And the local restaurants. I'm fairly sure my local Pizza Hut is not a front for a Columbian coke ring.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Forfeiture
If your employee is sitting in jail on drug charges and no one in the company knew it, there would be no reason do wipe the device. Also if you wipe the device after it becomes 'evidence' they will be mighty pissed and criminal charges may be handed out.
just because it maybe illegal to sell or possess certain drugs does not mean it's is illegal to buy them.
People need to learn how to buy and sell drugs...
There's one important difference between calling back numbers from a pager and using someone's texting service to impersonate them that I think the judge forgot.
When you call back a paged number, your voice is being heard by the "target" of the sting. If the target is too stupid to realize they're not talking to the person they paged, they're fair game for getting burned by the police.
But when you use someone's text messaging service, there is no indication that you're not "talking" to the person you think you are. In my mind, that takes it up a notch into "entrapment."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.