So, every app, every eBook, every email, every everything on your iPhone is now open to the cops if they arrest you, even if they arrest you on phony charges just just to look through your phone? Sure, the arrest gets tossed, but they now have your data.
The California Supreme Court allowed police Monday to search arrestees’ cell phones without a warrant, saying defendants lose their privacy rights for any items they’re carrying when taken into custody. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedents, “this loss of privacy allows police not only to seize anything of importance they find on the arrestee’s body … but also to open and examine what they find,” the state court said in a 5-2 ruling.
The majority, led by Justice Ming Chin, relied on decisions in the 1970s by the nation’s high court upholding searches of cigarette packages and clothing that officers seized during an arrest and examined later without seeking a warrant from a judge.
The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn’t be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data.
Monday’s decision allows police “to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee’s person,” said Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, joined in dissent by Justice Carlos Moreno.
[…]
“This has an impact on the day-to-day jobs of police officers, what kind of searches they can conduct without a warrant when they arrest someone,” she said. “It takes it into the realm of new technology.” […] Although the court has never ruled on police searches of cell phones, Wilson argued that it has signaled approval by allowing officers to examine the contents of arrestees’ wallets without a warrant.
The Constitution evolves with time. Obeying the terms of the 4th amendment means you are ceding sovereignty to the framers, with whom we have less similarity than Canadians. I would never cede sovereignty to Canadians, so why would I cede it to the Framers by honoring the 4th Amendment?
Bravo Animby–reading before going off half cocked==you are a role model for us all. I had to read that poorly headlined article twice myself. Why is the public mislead (so often) like this?
As the article, or some other article, or I’ll just go ahead and say it: you can’t cross examine a dog. They could well be alerting on the crack. Every Mexican has one and who knows what all the trace digestive compounds are? I found that curious as well. They might be recycled border control dogs? Heh, heh.
Mikey==you would cede constitutional interpretation to well understood original intent as one school of constitutional interpretation. Whatever you actually decide though is on “you” as our FF’s are all dead and not responsible for what we do under cover of such attribution.
MikeN, it’s true. Canadians are better than you.
“I love Bruce Springsteen. He’s like America’s Bryan Adams.”
would smart phones count because phones now are exactly like computers… (some)