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Posted on 04/30/2014 8:10:20 AM PDT by BuckeyeTexan
WASHINGTON — Confronting a right-to-privacy question in the new world of smartphones, the Supreme Court justices sounded closely split Tuesday on whether police officers should be free to search through the phone of any person who is arrested.
Justice Elena Kagan, the newest and youngest member of the high court, urged her colleagues to insist on protecting privacy.
“People carry their entire lives on their cellphone,” she said during the argument involving a San Diego case. If there are no limits, a police officer could stop a motorist for not having seat belt buckled and download a huge amount of information, looking for some evidence of wrongdoing, she warned.
Such a search could include “every single email, all their bank records, all their medical records,” she said, as well as GPS data that would show everywhere they had traveled recently.
But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. pressed the opposite view. Police who make an arrest have always been permitted to check a wallet, a billfold or a purse, and that might include personal photos.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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That’s what the locking function is for. Make them get a court order and then defy it.
And if the phone is encrypted?
Breyer, Thomas, Alito almost always side with .gov searches.
Exactly. You have the right to remain silent.
They ain’t gettin my password. :)
If they want something, they can go ask the NSA who already has everything. Just need to fill out the interagency paperwork, that’s all.
Correct my only words will be “I would like my attorney please”.
impeach obama
There are fairly simple ways of cracking those passcodes. It wouldn't surprise me if one or more phones were soon marketed with a more secure locking system, as well as a destructive reformat "panic" code option.
If the police believe that there is evidence on my phone, they should arrest me, hold my phone, and then get a search warrant to search it, just like they (theoretically) need to search my home. No, I will not provide the pass code. The fact that they cannot get into my phone is not my problem.
Actually, I don’t think it is as simply as you imply. My daughter had an iPhone here on a weekend and her little girl got hold of it and started punching buttons and accidentally locked it.
After a couple of hours on the phone with Apple support it basically ended up that if the phone were completely erased and reset, it may be possible to get into it, and that wasn’t a sure thing. The damned thing only gave you a very few tries at the code and with each successive try, the time period between times it would allow you to try again increased almost exponentially. After about three or four tries it would lock you out basically forever.
My daughter only got into it several hours later when she brought up the code screen and asked her three year old to show her what she punched. She pointed to the “5” and nothing else. Daughter tried 5555 - and that was it!
Amen to that.
Kagan actually has a good point.
I would not expect the geriatric Justices to understand that people today use their cell phone for exactly the same purpose they used desktop computers for twenty years ago.
Who needs a warrant anymore? Just search anything and everything and everyone at any time...starting with these black rob creeps.
Therin lies your problem.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the manufacturers provided a universal unlock code/function for the police.
Traitors.
Sort of off topic, but ...
I’ve drilled their rights into my kids’ heads since they could understand the concept of remaining silent. They will provide only the minimum information required at traffic stops. They will not consent to a search under any circumstances. They will not answer investigatory questions from school administrators even when intimidated by campus security. Any they don’t fall for the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide routine.
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