Supreme Court to hear two cases on warentless searches of phones of arrestees

[thewayne]

This is interesting. One case involve an appeal from a man convicted of involvement of a gang shooting. He was pulled over for expired tags on his car, and a field search of his phone found pix of him posing in front of a car used in a shooting. The other is the case of a convicted drug dealer whose phone tied him to his house, where drugs were found. The interesting point of the latter is that it was not a smartphone.

In the case of the former, I don't think the police had probable cause to search the phone, they definitely didn't have a 'hot pursuit' basis such as in a kidnapping or Amber Alert. In the second, they had probable cause to subpoena telephone records, so why didn't they?

The basic problem is that smart phones are our lives. The cops can't search computers without a warrant, they shouldn't be able to search phones either.

The Court will hear oral arguments in April and issue a ruling by the end of June.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-supreme-court-weigh-cell-phone-searches-police-194336271.html

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/14/01/18/0152222/scotus-to-weigh-smartphone-searches-by-police

Comments

[silveradept]

Phones contain things that would be something covered by the Fourth. This shouldn't be a hard decision on that, the question is how much exemption they're going to give the police about it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that they can conflate 'National Security or Emergency' with their current exemptions or actually codify it, which means if they arrest you for suspected possession of drugs and search your phone without a warrant, that you can probably sue them for violating your privacy if you're innocent, but have fun in court and afterwards when you're on every cop's shit list.

[silveradept]

Ah, so basically no real thing, then.

[chirssly.livejournal.com]

Smartphones are computers, but getting a court to catch up to that reality is probably going to take a while. That, or the privacy afforded us by computers will be reduced to match smartphones...

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

For the most part, if your smart phone has a password lock and you turn it off before you are detained, they must get a court order to examine it. But that doesn't mean that they won't try.

It would royally suck if 4th amendment protections were stripped from privately owned computers.

The law moves very slowly, but it does move. Unfortunately sometimes that movement is retrograde.