It’s hardly a surprise when we see “Big Brother” peering over the shoulder of citizens in communist countries.
In countries like China and India, smartphones are not safe from the government’s prying eyes, and they are being used to track the movement of citizens.
Double whammy.
In the United States, and most Western cultures, the concept of personal privacy is high enough to consider data and information on a smartphone as – private. Private enough to legally keep out of governmental authorities view, unless there is a court order or part of a broader scheme of illegal activity.
Imagine if your local police scanned your iPhone as part of a routine traffic stop.
Strike that – there’s no need to imagine such activity, it’s happening in the State of Michigan.
In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a complaint alleging that Michigan State Police officers used forensic cellphone analyzers to snoop in drivers’ cellphones during routine traffic stops.
These forensic cellphone analyzers can retrieve private communication, such as SMS, recently dialed numbers, email, Facebook, Twitter, and even location data from the smartphone’s GPS. Of course, this is a valuable tool used to catch bad-guys, but deploying these devices into the field poses some complicated issues.
The device used by the Michigan State Police is called the Cellebrite UFED. This particular model can grab email, Web bookmarks, Web history, SIM data, cookies, notes, MMS, instant messages, Bluetooth devices, locations, journeys, GPS fixes, call logs, text messages, contacts and more.
This type of forensic devices have been used in the past, but the idea of using it during a routine traffic stop seems over reaching.
Wayne Logan, at the Florida State University had this to say:
One way to conceive of the Fourth Amendment is as an off-and-on switch. It’s not on if it’s not a search or a seizure, and it’s not on if the citizen consents to the search or seizure. One way of looking at it is that phones are just like any other container. Let’s say I’m stopped for speeding and the police find cocaine, and then I’m arrested for cocaine possession; the police could search my car. They could also search any duffel bags that were in my car, and let’s say that I had a box of notecards—they could search that. If [an officer] can search that container of notecards, the question becomes: Can he also search my iPhone, which also contains note cards of a sort? But the other argument is that it differs completely in kind, since the type of information on the phone is so different.
The courts are conflicted, and we find ourselves in a brand new area of legal opinion.
What do you think?
[via Popular Mechanics]
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