EFF Urges Court To Protect Privacy of Text Messages

netbuzz writes "The police in Washington state arrested a suspected drug dealer, rummaged through the text messages on his phone, responded to one message while pretending to be the suspect, arranged a meeting, and then arrested the recipient of the text — all without a warrant. The state argues – and an appeals court majority agreed – that both suspects had neither a legal expectation of privacy nor Fourth Amendment protection because both considerations evaporate the moment that any text message arrives on any phone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging the state's Supreme Court to overturn that decision and recognize that 'text messages are the 21st Century phone call.'"

Comments

identity theft.. inciting to crime.. unauthorized

[gl4ss]

identity theft.. inciting to crime.. unauthorized use of communications device(guess who got the bill for the sms's?)... you guys sure have a fucked police! (sms is either a phone call or more appropriately it's a letter).

Does not "evaporate"

[chrismcb]

What the government is arguing is A)

no warrant was required because there should be no expectation of privacy in text messages, as anyone can pick up someone else's phone and read what's stored there.

and B) the EFF claims

"The state argues that just because someone can intercept a communication, you should reasonably expect that communication to be intercepted.

Remember the 4th amendment says "and papers" it does not say "and private papers that no one else can see" There are lots of things that anyone can pickup and read... a letter in an envelope (which can be intercepted as well)
There is a difference between glancing over someone's shoulder and seeing the text on the screen and physically taking the device, navigating to the text message section and scrolling through the messages.
We have every right and expectation that those texts will be private. As long as they aren't on the screen as we wave the phone around in the air.
Why does everything like this have to go to the Supreme Court?

CFAA should handle this.

[VortexCortex]

Clearly the police were in violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.

Put 'em in jail.

Are warrants that hard to get?

[hedgemage]

All they had to do was get a warrant. If they had enough evidence to pick this guy up, I'm sure any judge would gladly sign off on a warrant to 'search' his phone and then follow the proper procedures for the ensuing sting operation. This is sloppy police work, nothing more, and now the public is being forced to pay the price for it by being forced to pay for court challenges because no one has the guts to admit they were sloppy.

The Solution: Burnnote.com

[splitsevin]

This is an Android, iOS and web app that just came out a few weeks ago. I've been playing with it and it's perfect for sending messages you don't want to exist after the person reads them.

Basically, it's a free messaging services where the messages self-destruct. They never get written do disk, just to volatile memory. If there's an outage messages will be lost, which sucks, but it does mean that they kind of mean business about privacy. The messages have a maximum shelf life of 30 days.

Here's a writeup in Techcrunch.

I don't know if it's going to get that big but I realized the other day that even in my non-criminal, law-abiding life there are still a lot of things that I send to people via SMS that I probably should not have. Lots. Of. Things.

They have a tech FAQ which goes into detail about encryption, privacy, etc.