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4th Amendment - Constitution - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Detroit - Ethics - Government - Liberals - Michigan - Police - Rights - Warner Todd Huston

Warrantless Searches By Police of Your Cell Phone

April 25, 2011 by

-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”

4th Amendment - Anti-Americanism - Civil Rights - Congress - Conservatives - Constitution - Crime - Democrats/Leftists - Freedom - Government - Judges - Law - Liberals - Liberty - Police - Regulation - Warner Todd Huston

Does Government Own Your Remotely Backed Up Computer Files, Your Emails, or Your Cell Phone GPS Info?

April 6, 2011 by 2 Comments

-By Warner Todd Huston

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.

As a result of this lapse in protection form unlawful search and seizure a new group of concerned parties intends to change the law with the Digital Fourth Amendment campaign. (http://www.digitalfourthamendment.org/)

The problem is not necessarily that government is out to steal all our computing information, but that the laws have simply not caught up to today’s technology. The laws that cover how policing agencies and governments can access your emails, computer files, and cell phone GPS records are currently governed by rules that are decades out of date. These rules were written in the 1980s, long before the Internet came along, before cloud computing was invented, before email, and well before cell phones that could track your whereabouts became pervasive.
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Does Government Own Your Remotely Backed Up Computer Files, Your Emails, or Your Cell Phone GPS Info?”