Court approves warrantless searches of cell phones

[Javaman]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/01/court-approves-warrantless-searches-of-cell-phones/

Reuters) – Police can search a cell phone for its number without having a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

Officers in Indiana found a number of cell phones at the scene of a drug bust, and searched each phone for its telephone number. Having the numbers allowed the government to subpoena the owners’ call histories, linking them to the drug-selling scheme.

One of the suspects, Abel Flores-Lopez, who was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, argued on appeal that the police had no right to search the phone’s contents without a warrant.

The U.S. Court of Appeal for the 7th Circuit rejected that argument, finding that the invasion of privacy was so slight that the police’s actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.

more at link...

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the 4th amendment has just been deleted from the constitution.

[madokie]

1. The dick and w shit on it

so no one wants to read that part anymore. Its a sad state we're in today

'bout forgot: I love my President

[lastlib]

7. It's just a G-- D----d piece of paper...

...isn't it?

[madokie]

8. To you and I it isn't but to them it is

'them' being the high rollers

[qazplm]

2. no it hasn't

all you are doing is identifying the owner, and often not even that if the phone isn't actually registered in someone's name. This is simply an inventory search which has been allowed for decades.

There is nothing particularly stunning or new about this ruling:

"Posner compared the cell phone to a diary. Just as police are entitled to open a pocket diary to copy an owner’s address, they should be able to turn on a cell phone to learn its number, he wrote. But just as they’re forbidden from examining love letters tucked between the pages of an address book, so are they forbidden from exploring letters in the files of a phone."

[Javaman]

3. While that may be true...

I'll wait till the first challenge to see how much "leeway" is given.

Then we will talk. Until then this just opens the door that much more into parcing our 4th amendment rights.

[qazplm]

6. again no it doesn't

the court cited for you past case law that is very similar to this situation. This is absolutely nothing new other than another way of applying very old legal principles. The police can search something incident to an arrest to determine who it belongs to. They need a warrant to do anything further, but if they don't know who owns something, makes it a wee bit hard to ever form the proper basis FOR a warrant, particularly a phone with no number/owner yet known.

The 4th Amendment is designed to protect against UNREASONABLE searches and seizures, not reasonable ones.

As for leeway, this case gave clear guidance that you can't go any farther, just like the diary cases did back in the day, just like all of the other cases that deal with these inventory type searches.

[showmethejedi]

4. sarcasm..

No your right criminals should be free to sell drugs in order to protect my cell phones constitutional rights. Not everything is so simple dude

[midnight]

5. Who's watching the watchers....