EFF Urges Court To Protect Privacy of Text Messages 93
netbuzz writes "The police in Washington state arrested a suspected drug dealer, rummaged through the text messages on his phone, responded to one message while pretending to be the suspect, arranged a meeting, and then arrested the recipient of the text — all without a warrant. The state argues – and an appeals court majority agreed – that both suspects had neither a legal expectation of privacy nor Fourth Amendment protection because both considerations evaporate the moment that any text message arrives on any phone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging the state's Supreme Court to overturn that decision and recognize that 'text messages are the 21st Century phone call.'"
CFAA should handle this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly the police were in violation of the computer fraud and abuse act.
Put 'em in jail.
The Solution: Burnnote.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, it's a free messaging services where the messages self-destruct. They never get written do disk, just to volatile memory. If there's an outage messages will be lost, which sucks, but it does mean that they kind of mean business about privacy. The messages have a maximum shelf life of 30 days.
Here's a writeup in Techcrunch. [techcrunch.com]
I don't know if it's going to get that big but I realized the other day that even in my non-criminal, law-abiding life there are still a lot of things that I send to people via SMS that I probably should not have. Lots. Of. Things.
They have a tech FAQ which goes into detail about encryption, privacy, etc. [burnnote.com]