-By Warner Todd Huston
News during this past week a story made the rounds that police in Michigan may be using a device in random traffic stops that instantly copies all the data on your cell phone and stores it for later use by police. It was said that this data copying is going on without consent and without a warrant. Michigan police are denying this claim, but the ACLU posted a letter warning them against this policy regardless. The fear here is, of course, that copying cell phone data without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against illegal search and seizure.
This device copies everything that is on your phone. Your contacts, your emails, your texts, other instant messages, what aps you use, web bookmarks and usage, GPS location info… every bit of data stored on your phone is instantly copied into the device and into the data base maintained by police.
Famed blogger Glenn Reynolds, a lawyer by trade, seems to think that it is obviously a violation of the Fourth and that current law can even be used as precedent to assure that fact. Others are not so sure.
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Warrantless Searches By Police of Your Cell Phone”
Did you know that there are no laws to prevent government agencies from raiding your computer’s remotely hosted back up files, your third party emails, your cloud computing files, or your cell phone GPS location records? Well, there aren’t. As the law stands today government can go into your private computer files or trace your cell phone location without a warrant.
Several news sources have been working for days to get to the bottom of a story that might end up revealing that the head of one of Democrat Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s police security details was involved in a racist attack on several black students in downstate Carlinville. Worse, the story seems to be undergoing a political cover up as news agencies are being stymied in rooting out the details.
In the race for the Chicago Mayor’s office we have seen quite a lot of evidence that Chicago’s union bosses are not big Rahm Emanuelites. This week we got another hint in that direction as several more unions came out in support of Emanuel’s most serious opponent, Gery Chico.
A British police chief has prohibited his own officers from patrolling a local park after dark because he and his fellows are afraid of the punks and trouble makers that infest the place at night. Thanks to a self-destructive and blind obeisance to PCism Britain has truly become an asylum run by the inmates. But this disease of PCism is one that left-wingers in America dearly want to emulate. Will the USA soon find police afraid of their own shadows, too?
From contacts in the Senate we’ve learned that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, Nev.) will likely on Wednesday (Dec. 8th) try and bring a cloture vote on The DREAM Act and the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act in order to grab as much power for his supporters as he can before his power is weakened starting in the next congress.
There really is no excuse for any public servant to retire with a pension worth $1.3 million dollars of the people’s tax money. None. But that is precisely what happens in the City of Chicago according to Chicago’s Civic Committee.
Harry Reid survived his brush with electoral death winning yet another term as Nevada’s Senator. Reid knows what side of his bread is buttered, too. Big Labor gave him millions in campaign donations and Reid knows who he owes — or rather who owns him. Now that he’s fairly won he’s promising his patrons in Big Labor that he intends to push one of their favorite laws.
To attest to the ever more authoritarian nature of our federal government, I give you the stormtroopers of the National Archives who, for some unfathomable reason, have guns, badges and the power to “raid homes.”
In shockingly quick order last month, Yorkville resident Robert Lea raised 5,000 signatures in only two weeks to challenge incumbent Kendall County Sheriff Richard Randall in the November general elections.
In the wake of the new Supreme Court decision on the 2nd Amendment, we have this illuminating story from Ohio and if this isn’t the perfect example of why American gun owners fear detailed firearm owners registration records in the hands of government officials there isn’t one to be had. Ohio’s State Democrat Party recently sent a letter to every county sheriff’s office demanding that sheriffs send them the names and addresses of all concealed carry permit holders in their county.
The Illinois State Police has
Want to hear the latest idiocy against the Arizona anti-illegal immigrant law dreamed up by open-border advocates and illegal alien supporters? Well, try this on for size: Arizona’s SB 1070 helps men beat their wives and girlfriends.
Some of my
New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has repeatedly proven that he hates the U.S. Constitution and that he feels that he a right to harass any citizen he pleases — even ones that have broken no laws. But now he has also shown his lack of manhood because it has been revealed that
In an “analysis” on how President Obama is dealing with the race issue, AP writer Charles Babington seems to have based his take on what happened to Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on the assumption that
A recent 