SCOTUS hears cases on police searches of cell phones

[PokerGuy]

Surprised there isn't a thread about this yet. The SCOTUS yesterday heard arguments about a couple of cases regarding police searching of personal phones.

http://www.cnet.com/news/supreme-court-debates-police-permission-to-search-cell-phones/

This just seems to be one of those cases where technology has moved so rapidly that the law hasn't been able to keep up.

I'd argue that modern smart phones aren't really primarily "phones" at all. They are really more like portable PC's that happen to also allow you to make/take calls. The amount of information you could potentially get off a smartphone search is staggering, especially with gps tracking etc on every phone. On the flip side, if someone has evidence on a cell phone, they could easily destroy it (remotely if needed) if the police can't capture that evidence.

I don't see how the court could reasonably rule that the police can search smart phones without a warrant, but there needs to be some construct to protect evidence so it doesn't get destroyed before the police can get a warrant for it.

Regardless, the ruling in this case could impact all of us as more and more folks use smartphones for all sorts of things.

On a side note, I'm surprised there aren't more easy to use and robust tools available that allow people to encrypt their entire phone in a way that can't easily be bypassed. The security access controls on androids and iphones by default are a joke, and most of the available tools are either difficult to use or ineffective.

What say you?

 

[SaurusX]

Considering that a smartphone is connected to every single one of your online interactions, does that mean police would have free reign to poke around in your entire online life if you didn't come to a complete stop at that stop sign? Seems a ridiculous argument to make, but we'll see how the bozos end up ruling. After all, Obamacare is a tax.

 

[fskimospy]

Seems to me like a lot of the information contained in a cell phone is quite similar to the 'papers' that the 4th amendment refers to. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that the police would be able to search through your entire life just because you were arrested for a minor offense. It seems likely that SCOTUS will at a minimum limit their ability to do that, although I personally would go much further.

 

[Jaskalas]

Seems to me like a lot of the information contained in a cell phone is quite similar to the 'papers' that the 4th amendment refers to. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that the police would be able to search through your entire life just because you were arrested for a minor offense. It seems likely that SCOTUS will at a minimum limit their ability to do that, although I personally would go much further.

We stand in agreement.

 

[TerryMathews]

Seems to me like a lot of the information contained in a cell phone is quite similar to the 'papers' that the 4th amendment refers to. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that the police would be able to search through your entire life just because you were arrested for a minor offense. It seems likely that SCOTUS will at a minimum limit their ability to do that, although I personally would go much further.

We are in agreement on this. The modern equivalent of what the founders meant when they said "papers" is most certainly what is on my phone.

 

[DCal430]

I don't know how this will go. In a prior case the Justices were unable to rule that warrantless GPS tracking was illegal. So it might not go well for privacy advocates.

Because of the SCOTUS ruling law enforcement continue to use cell phones to track people WITHOUT any warrant. Using your movements gathered WITHOUT any warrant as evidence against you, in order to obtain a warrant. In these cases law enforcement has a hunch you are doing something wrong, so they contact your cell provider and get access to your every location through the day. They see you going to a known drug dealer house or something, and now they have proof against you for a warrant.

 

[Knowing]

Your papers are forfeit unless you have taken informed measures to protect them.

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01376.html

We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.

 

[Oldgamer]

At the rate that things have been going lately with SCOTUS and other state supreme court rulings, it would not surprise me if they rule in favor of the cops. We have no more privacy rights anymore.