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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."
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.
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?
:(){
Are you talking about this comic strip?
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-was-entrapped
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.
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
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.
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.