Police Can Search Cell Phones Without Warrants

Hugh Pickens writes "The California Supreme Court has ruled 5 to 2 to allow police 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 US 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. The dissenting justices said those rulings shouldn't be extended to modern cell phones that can store huge amounts of data and that the 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.' Interestingly enough, the Ohio Supreme Court reached an opposite conclusion in a December 2009 ruling that police had violated drug defendants' rights by searching their cell phones after their arrests. The Ohio-California split could prompt the US Supreme Court to take up the issue, says California Deputy Attorney General Victoria Wilson, who represented the prosecution in the case."

Computer that happens to be a phone

[Culture20]

Glad I use an iPhone and it's really a computer.

random searches for low-level crimes

[digitaldc]

Monday's ruling upheld the drug conviction of Gregory Diaz, arrested in April 2007 by Ventura County sheriff's deputies who said they had seen him taking part in a drug deal. An officer took a cell phone from Diaz's pocket, looked at the text message folder 90 minutes later, and found a message that linked Diaz to the sale, the court said. Diaz pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and appealed the search.

WHEW! I feel SO much safer now that these low-level drug dealers are getting arrested and searched. I can now walk the streets safely knowing that these minor crimes are being prosecuted with probation sentences and bonus cell-phone searches.
I think we should just randomly pull poor people over and search everything they have including their cell phones and hopefully we can find SOMETHING to bust these criminals with!

Well, clearly if they didn't have anything to hide

[Delusion_]

...then they shouldn't have gotten arrested.

Re:Computer that happens to be a phone

[Thing 1]

"At first they came for the druggies, but I" -- oh wait.

Re:Passwords

[JustOK]

fuckyoucoppersyou'llnevergetmy42passwords!FUCKERs!!1! is a pretty strong password.