7 ms·

California appeals court approves cell phone search during traffic stop

98 points by rkalla 15y ago

jmjerlecki 15y ago
Im curious if this has any impact to people who have their phone password protected. "Here, you are more than welcome to go through my phone....just need to guess the password." You can't even hook your iPhone up to iTunes without inputting that password, so I can't imagine those phone searching devices can bypass that altogether.
- bcl 15y ago
  Or password protected and encrypted. My Droid X2 won't let you mount the partitions until the password is entered.
  - mindslight 15y ago
    Mind if I ask what distribution you are running?
    - bcl 15y ago
      Whichever version Verizon distributes for the X2, I haven't needed to root the phone so far.
- 01PH 15y ago
  This is the device most likely going to be used: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20055431-1.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20055431-1.html
- rkalla 15y ago
  The court ruled that this is OK because your phone is considered a "container", given that, I believe the same rules for saying "Go ahead and search my trunk, but I don't have a key" applies -- assuming the cop doesn't just pry it open in some physical way. The threat being that you'll get detained and held. I think that is always the implied threat, that it is just easier to let someone of authority overstep their bounds so as to avoid personal inconvenience and discomfort as opposed to taking a stand and forcing the legality of the issue. Then if you are illegally detained, that's ANOTHER issue you are welcome to pursue if you enjoy court and lawyers, but we typically don't. The (expected?) result of that is one side keeps pushing harder and harder until we eventually start pushing back. These seem like standard social mechanics much like what corporations tend to do left unwatched or govt laws. They keep tightening or growing their area of influence until someone or something pushes back. Our society is just a giant physics simulation of forces interacting on each other, like little (or big) spheres of gravity. I'd love to see a visualization of the social world around us, would be interesting... you could see the formation of under ground movements becoming more mainstream as those individual forces combined into bigger forces temporarily to combat larger forces, then once the equilibrium was rebalanced, the larger force would disband and go back to micro-influencing the environment around it. wow... I got derailed there :)
  - michaelfeathers 15y ago
    I thought I was the only one who thought that way.
  - alttag 15y ago
    > I believe the same rules for saying "Go ahead and search > my trunk, but I don't have a key" applies I see your point, but think you'll agree it's best not to phrase it as a challenge: "I don't consent to the search. I don't have a key."
    - rkalla 15y ago
      heh, absolutely agreed there. I think the police have a hard enough job as it is.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Saying "go ahead and search my trunk but I don't have a key" sounds like a spectacularly bad idea. You can probably safely refuse (politely) to consent to all searches under any circumstances. If the police are allowed to search without consent, they will. The police cannot search the trunk of your car incident to an arrest. The police can open and inventory the contents of your trunk if your vehicle is impounded. The police can search the passenger compartment of your car if you are arrested. You can be arrested and not have your vehicle impounded if, after arresting you and satisfying their entitlement to search the passenger compartment of your car, you have a companion who can legally drive the car away. In this case, the guy's companion was intoxicated. The police can consent to leave your car somewhere safe without impounding it, but for all intents and purposes they have the option of impounding it if it can't be removed lawfully on the spot. If your car is impounded and its contents inventoried, anything that can reasonably be inspected as part of an inventory is admissible as evidence. This opinion held that inventory searches did not entitle the police to "inventory" the "contents" of a phone. But that's beside the point here, because the search that busted open the phone wasn't an inventory search; it was a search for preservation of evidence incident to arrest.
sweeper33 15y ago
I think this is a dangerous road to go down. Even though I feel that Safety on the roads is paramount and that there are way too many people that talk or text while on their phones, I think this becomes an invasion of privacy unless the police officer has reasonable cause to go through your phone (i.e. saw you on your phone or texting). Also, cell phones are only a drop in the bucket. I've seen and had my passengers take pictures of people in their cars putting on make up or even reading! It's insane what all is out there. So what's next, cops will check women's purses for makeup usage? Books in the car for freshly turned pages? I know i'm being dramatic here, but the point is, there has to be a line somewhere. I do want the roads to be safer and I want drivers to be less distracted (texting while driving is actually more dangerous than driving drunk according to a study http://www.cnbc.com/id/31545004/Texting_And_Driving_Worse_Than_Drinking_and_Driving http://www.cnbc.com/id/31545004/Texting_And_Driving_Worse_Th...), but I also don't want some random police officer rifling through my private text messages, e-mails and voicemails for the purposes of seeing if I should get another ticket. Additionally, I often make short trips for lunch (.1 miles or less). If a police officer does go through my phone, how is he to know I didn't send that text just as I got in my car before I left Wendy's to return to the office? He doesn't, no one does. That's the problem with this and why I feel it is too much of an invasion.
- rkalla 15y ago
  > Even though I feel that Safety on the roads is paramount and that there are way too many people that talk or text while on their phones This law isn't about keeping people safer, whether you were on your phone or not the officer has the right to search it (apparently). I imagine the motivations for this law is the same straw men they always are: drug dealers, illegal activity, child pornography, etc. etc. > I also don't want some random police officer rifling through my private text messages, e-mails and voicemails for the purposes of seeing if I should get another ticket. I don't even think it is that clear cut; if the officer pulled you over, he already has a reason to ticket you. Looking through your phone isn't going to make that better/worse unless you are involved in illicit activity and they find evidence of that on your phone. Then worse :) > Additionally, I often make short trips for lunch (.1 miles or less). If a police officer does go through my phone, how is he to know I didn't send that text just as I got in my car before I left Wendy's to return to the office? You don't need to worry about this (not what the law is for).
hack_edu 15y ago
Lock your phones. Do not consent to searches, saying it cleary and decisively. Ask why you are being held, and continue to ask if you can leave.
- dkokelley 15y ago
  None of that would have mattered in this case. He was arrested already. The phone search was part of an "inventory" search for impounding the car. A judge would have issued a warrant for the phone contents as he did for the home later in the case (where the authorities found guns, drugs, and money). The interesting part of this case has to do with the precedent that a cell phone is a "container" just like a glove box or safe. As such, when being legally searched (such as when doing an inventory search) it can be accessed and the contents claimed as evidence.
  - hack_edu 15y ago
    My advice is assuming you've yet to be arrested or questioned thoroughly. Cops are legally required to answer these questions truthfully, and if don't ask them specifically cops are known to play with semantics and probing questions to get you to implicate yourself. Approaching a police interaction like I said above helps you end the interaction before letting the cop get near the point of reasonable suspicion.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    This is incorrect in a couple of interesting directions, if you read the (annoyingly numerous) other comments I've written in the thread. Here, I'll just suffice it to say that even in an arrest search, and maybe even in a warranted search, if the police can't decrypt your phone, that's the ballgame.
CWuestefeld 15y ago
I wonder what the definition is of something being "on" my phone. Suppose that in the course of searching my phone, a cop runs the Facebook app. He sees one of my friends make (purely as a joke, as someone who knows him would understand) some asinine, but apparently threatening comment. That comment wasn't there when I last looked, indeed, it's not "there" at all, but on Facebook's server. Could I be considered to be complicit in my friend's (joking) plot? Now change the circumstance slightly, so instead of FB, it's a SMS text message. Again, it just arrived, so I don't even know it's there. My friend is jokingly asking if I've completed some illegal activity. Can this be used as evidence against me? The purpose of these 4th Amendment protections isn't just protection of privacy. It's also because in many cases, the evidence implies incorrect conclusions when you assume that the suspect knowingly and intentionally possessed something (of which he was really unaware). For me, this idea was really driven home by the movie "The Star Chamber"[1]. On the surface it's just a crime thriller, but the idea it posits is really worth thinking about. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086356/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086356/
- Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
  The examples you give aren't great. I don't think there's anything you can be found guilty of for reading someone else's threatening comment on Facebook or elsewhere. With the SMS the critical thing is the implication that you're guilty of something - whether you'd read it or not doesn't matter. To look at the idea further though, these things are best thought of as fishing trips. It's very unlikely anything on your phone is going to directly incriminate you, it's more likely that it's going to point to involvement in a crime and provide the police either with further lines of enquiry (investigating the person who sent the message) or a reason to carry out a more thorough investigation of you (and potentially grounds for a warrant). On it's own it would it seem that anything of this sort would be, at best, circumstantial evidence. (All of this assumes that it wouldn't be struck down as unconstitutional - state laws obviously not being able to overturn the constitution).
  - tptacek 15y ago
    You should be careful when you talk about "circumstantial evidence". There's a very pervasive meme that circumstantial evidence is somehow invalid, but that has never, ever been the case.
fourk 15y ago
The title seems misleading, unless I'm misreading something. From the article: > "the judge ruled that the examination of the cell phone was legal because > police were allowed to survey the impounded car for their own safety, and > to preserve evidence." The number of traffic stops where an impoundment occurs is clearly a very small subset of all traffic stops. Shouldn't this be titled 'California appeals court approves cell phone search during vehicle impoundment'?
- nhebb 15y ago
  They searched the phone before obtaining a warrant. This ruling is troubling not because of the case at hand, but because of the precedent it sets. It's definitely an area where the law could be better defined.
  - fourk 15y ago
    Is a warrant required to search a vehicle during an impoundment? During a routine traffic stop, a warrant, permission, or probable cause is required to search a vehicle. Doesn't this ruling set the precedent that if and only if the police would be legally allowed to search a vehicle, they may search a phone contained within that vehicle? (IANAL)
    - jessedhillon 15y ago
      IANAL either. However, in South Dakota v. Opperman (http://supreme.justia.com/us/428/364/case.html http://supreme.justia.com/us/428/364/case.html) the court upheld that police may search and inventory a car without a warrant, even though the car was impounded for parking violations and not on suspicion of drug offenses (as it turned out was the case). I would conclude, therefore, that a car impounded during an arrest can definitely be searched.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Searches do not invariably require warrants. For instance, you will be searched "incident to arrest" if you are formally arrested (ie, not merely detained). This is part of why the police cannot casually arrest random people. Similarly, the police cannot casually impound random cars.
tptacek 15y ago
No. Not a traffic stop. An arrest. Reckless driving, driving without a license, DUI. This probably isn't a great test case to get up in arms about. Here's the opinion: http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-phonesearch.pdf http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-phonesearch.pdf Some things you'd want to know before formulating your own opinion: * Since at least '73, the law of the land has been that after you're arrested, the police can without a warrant lawfully search you and the immediate area under your control. The lawful objectives of that search are either officer safety or preservation of evidence. If you're arrested while driving a vehicle, and either of those objectives militate a search of the passenger compartment of your car, the police can search the passenger compartment of your car. * The argument was made here in an earlier hearing that the cell phone search occurred as part of an "inventory" search; this is one of the contexts in which cell phones were claimed to be a "container". But the controlling appellate opinion here rejected that interpretation; the police cannot search a cell phone to "inventory" its contents. * But that is a moot point if you are arrested, because the police are explicitly entitled to search your person and your car for evidence if you're arrested. Don't get arrested! Here we have the second "phone-as-container" context: the phone is a container for evidence of crimes. It's this interpretation that the appellate court affirmed, and reasonably so! * More importantly, in this particular case, this guy was screwed from the get-go. He was arrested for driving a car without a license, for which he could not document lawful possession, after doing 90MPH in a 65, on suspicion (later validated) of being under the influence, accompanied by a clearly intoxicated passenger. When the police searched his car incident to the arrest, they found a loaded gun in the car under the drivers seat, along with drug paraphernalia. Then they found the Blackberry with the screensaver set to the guy holding two assault rifles. Face it. That phone was getting searched. The notion that searching the phone pushes the bounds of "incident to arrest" searches is at best a technicality; under the same pattern of facts, a warrant for the search would be a no-brainer as well. * ...but it seems extremely dubious to argue that this is even a real technicality. A search of your car is a big deal. The police are not lawfully entitled to invade the privacy of your car without reason. Getting arrested is a big deal. The police are not lawfully entitled to arrest you for no reason (there is a world of difference between arrest and mere "detention"). The search the police get to conduct when they arrest you is explicitly not limited to officer safety (like the weapons search frisk of a Terry stop). This guy's lawyer argues that the phone search was out of bounds because of an expectation of privacy. What expectation of privacy? They're in your car. They found your gun and your secret drug shit. Your privacy is largely out the window. Your trunk might, for a few minutes, be out of bounds because it's not necessarily your trunk. But the phone with your dumbass picture on it holding assault rifles is clearly yours. Someone downthread had the right practical response to this: lock your phone. There's no secret software the police have that will suck all the info off an iPhone with a 6-digit PIN. Politely decline consent for searches. Do not get in a police officer's face; if you give them a justification to arrest you for any reason, all bets are off. Don't get arrested.
georgefox 15y ago
I expected to see a lot of Steve Jobs-related posts on HN today, but I did not expect a sensationalist article from a Glenn Beck website to make the front page.
georgieporgie 15y ago
Flagged for being a wildly inaccurate, inflammatory headline.

98 points by rkalla 15y ago

Im curious if this has any impact to people who have their phone password protected. "Here, you are more than welcome to go through my phone....just need to guess the password." You can't even hook your iPhone up to iTunes without inputting that password, so I can't imagine those phone searching devices can bypass that altogether.

bcl 15y ago
Or password protected and encrypted. My Droid X2 won't let you mount the partitions until the password is entered.
- mindslight 15y ago
  Mind if I ask what distribution you are running?
  - bcl 15y ago
    Whichever version Verizon distributes for the X2, I haven't needed to root the phone so far.
01PH 15y ago
This is the device most likely going to be used: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20055431-1.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20055431-1.html
rkalla 15y ago
The court ruled that this is OK because your phone is considered a "container", given that, I believe the same rules for saying "Go ahead and search my trunk, but I don't have a key" applies -- assuming the cop doesn't just pry it open in some physical way. The threat being that you'll get detained and held. I think that is always the implied threat, that it is just easier to let someone of authority overstep their bounds so as to avoid personal inconvenience and discomfort as opposed to taking a stand and forcing the legality of the issue. Then if you are illegally detained, that's ANOTHER issue you are welcome to pursue if you enjoy court and lawyers, but we typically don't. The (expected?) result of that is one side keeps pushing harder and harder until we eventually start pushing back. These seem like standard social mechanics much like what corporations tend to do left unwatched or govt laws. They keep tightening or growing their area of influence until someone or something pushes back. Our society is just a giant physics simulation of forces interacting on each other, like little (or big) spheres of gravity. I'd love to see a visualization of the social world around us, would be interesting... you could see the formation of under ground movements becoming more mainstream as those individual forces combined into bigger forces temporarily to combat larger forces, then once the equilibrium was rebalanced, the larger force would disband and go back to micro-influencing the environment around it. wow... I got derailed there :)
- michaelfeathers 15y ago
  I thought I was the only one who thought that way.
- alttag 15y ago
  > I believe the same rules for saying "Go ahead and search > my trunk, but I don't have a key" applies I see your point, but think you'll agree it's best not to phrase it as a challenge: "I don't consent to the search. I don't have a key."
  - rkalla 15y ago
    heh, absolutely agreed there. I think the police have a hard enough job as it is.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Saying "go ahead and search my trunk but I don't have a key" sounds like a spectacularly bad idea. You can probably safely refuse (politely) to consent to all searches under any circumstances. If the police are allowed to search without consent, they will. The police cannot search the trunk of your car incident to an arrest. The police can open and inventory the contents of your trunk if your vehicle is impounded. The police can search the passenger compartment of your car if you are arrested. You can be arrested and not have your vehicle impounded if, after arresting you and satisfying their entitlement to search the passenger compartment of your car, you have a companion who can legally drive the car away. In this case, the guy's companion was intoxicated. The police can consent to leave your car somewhere safe without impounding it, but for all intents and purposes they have the option of impounding it if it can't be removed lawfully on the spot. If your car is impounded and its contents inventoried, anything that can reasonably be inspected as part of an inventory is admissible as evidence. This opinion held that inventory searches did not entitle the police to "inventory" the "contents" of a phone. But that's beside the point here, because the search that busted open the phone wasn't an inventory search; it was a search for preservation of evidence incident to arrest.

sweeper33 15y ago

I think this is a dangerous road to go down. Even though I feel that Safety on the roads is paramount and that there are way too many people that talk or text while on their phones, I think this becomes an invasion of privacy unless the police officer has reasonable cause to go through your phone (i.e. saw you on your phone or texting). Also, cell phones are only a drop in the bucket. I've seen and had my passengers take pictures of people in their cars putting on make up or even reading! It's insane what all is out there. So what's next, cops will check women's purses for makeup usage? Books in the car for freshly turned pages? I know i'm being dramatic here, but the point is, there has to be a line somewhere. I do want the roads to be safer and I want drivers to be less distracted (texting while driving is actually more dangerous than driving drunk according to a study http://www.cnbc.com/id/31545004/Texting_And_Driving_Worse_Than_Drinking_and_Driving http://www.cnbc.com/id/31545004/Texting_And_Driving_Worse_Th...), but I also don't want some random police officer rifling through my private text messages, e-mails and voicemails for the purposes of seeing if I should get another ticket. Additionally, I often make short trips for lunch (.1 miles or less). If a police officer does go through my phone, how is he to know I didn't send that text just as I got in my car before I left Wendy's to return to the office? He doesn't, no one does. That's the problem with this and why I feel it is too much of an invasion.

rkalla 15y ago
> Even though I feel that Safety on the roads is paramount and that there are way too many people that talk or text while on their phones This law isn't about keeping people safer, whether you were on your phone or not the officer has the right to search it (apparently). I imagine the motivations for this law is the same straw men they always are: drug dealers, illegal activity, child pornography, etc. etc. > I also don't want some random police officer rifling through my private text messages, e-mails and voicemails for the purposes of seeing if I should get another ticket. I don't even think it is that clear cut; if the officer pulled you over, he already has a reason to ticket you. Looking through your phone isn't going to make that better/worse unless you are involved in illicit activity and they find evidence of that on your phone. Then worse :) > Additionally, I often make short trips for lunch (.1 miles or less). If a police officer does go through my phone, how is he to know I didn't send that text just as I got in my car before I left Wendy's to return to the office? You don't need to worry about this (not what the law is for).

hack_edu 15y ago

Lock your phones. Do not consent to searches, saying it cleary and decisively. Ask why you are being held, and continue to ask if you can leave.

dkokelley 15y ago
None of that would have mattered in this case. He was arrested already. The phone search was part of an "inventory" search for impounding the car. A judge would have issued a warrant for the phone contents as he did for the home later in the case (where the authorities found guns, drugs, and money). The interesting part of this case has to do with the precedent that a cell phone is a "container" just like a glove box or safe. As such, when being legally searched (such as when doing an inventory search) it can be accessed and the contents claimed as evidence.
- hack_edu 15y ago
  My advice is assuming you've yet to be arrested or questioned thoroughly. Cops are legally required to answer these questions truthfully, and if don't ask them specifically cops are known to play with semantics and probing questions to get you to implicate yourself. Approaching a police interaction like I said above helps you end the interaction before letting the cop get near the point of reasonable suspicion.
- tptacek 15y ago
  This is incorrect in a couple of interesting directions, if you read the (annoyingly numerous) other comments I've written in the thread. Here, I'll just suffice it to say that even in an arrest search, and maybe even in a warranted search, if the police can't decrypt your phone, that's the ballgame.

CWuestefeld 15y ago

I wonder what the definition is of something being "on" my phone. Suppose that in the course of searching my phone, a cop runs the Facebook app. He sees one of my friends make (purely as a joke, as someone who knows him would understand) some asinine, but apparently threatening comment. That comment wasn't there when I last looked, indeed, it's not "there" at all, but on Facebook's server. Could I be considered to be complicit in my friend's (joking) plot? Now change the circumstance slightly, so instead of FB, it's a SMS text message. Again, it just arrived, so I don't even know it's there. My friend is jokingly asking if I've completed some illegal activity. Can this be used as evidence against me? The purpose of these 4th Amendment protections isn't just protection of privacy. It's also because in many cases, the evidence implies incorrect conclusions when you assume that the suspect knowingly and intentionally possessed something (of which he was really unaware). For me, this idea was really driven home by the movie "The Star Chamber"[1]. On the surface it's just a crime thriller, but the idea it posits is really worth thinking about. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086356/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086356/

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
The examples you give aren't great. I don't think there's anything you can be found guilty of for reading someone else's threatening comment on Facebook or elsewhere. With the SMS the critical thing is the implication that you're guilty of something - whether you'd read it or not doesn't matter. To look at the idea further though, these things are best thought of as fishing trips. It's very unlikely anything on your phone is going to directly incriminate you, it's more likely that it's going to point to involvement in a crime and provide the police either with further lines of enquiry (investigating the person who sent the message) or a reason to carry out a more thorough investigation of you (and potentially grounds for a warrant). On it's own it would it seem that anything of this sort would be, at best, circumstantial evidence. (All of this assumes that it wouldn't be struck down as unconstitutional - state laws obviously not being able to overturn the constitution).
- tptacek 15y ago
  You should be careful when you talk about "circumstantial evidence". There's a very pervasive meme that circumstantial evidence is somehow invalid, but that has never, ever been the case.

fourk 15y ago

The title seems misleading, unless I'm misreading something. From the article: > "the judge ruled that the examination of the cell phone was legal because > police were allowed to survey the impounded car for their own safety, and > to preserve evidence." The number of traffic stops where an impoundment occurs is clearly a very small subset of all traffic stops. Shouldn't this be titled 'California appeals court approves cell phone search during vehicle impoundment'?

nhebb 15y ago
They searched the phone before obtaining a warrant. This ruling is troubling not because of the case at hand, but because of the precedent it sets. It's definitely an area where the law could be better defined.
- fourk 15y ago
  Is a warrant required to search a vehicle during an impoundment? During a routine traffic stop, a warrant, permission, or probable cause is required to search a vehicle. Doesn't this ruling set the precedent that if and only if the police would be legally allowed to search a vehicle, they may search a phone contained within that vehicle? (IANAL)
  - jessedhillon 15y ago
    IANAL either. However, in South Dakota v. Opperman (http://supreme.justia.com/us/428/364/case.html http://supreme.justia.com/us/428/364/case.html) the court upheld that police may search and inventory a car without a warrant, even though the car was impounded for parking violations and not on suspicion of drug offenses (as it turned out was the case). I would conclude, therefore, that a car impounded during an arrest can definitely be searched.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Searches do not invariably require warrants. For instance, you will be searched "incident to arrest" if you are formally arrested (ie, not merely detained). This is part of why the police cannot casually arrest random people. Similarly, the police cannot casually impound random cars.

tptacek 15y ago

No. Not a traffic stop. An arrest. Reckless driving, driving without a license, DUI. This probably isn't a great test case to get up in arms about. Here's the opinion: http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-phonesearch.pdf http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-phonesearch.pdf Some things you'd want to know before formulating your own opinion: * Since at least '73, the law of the land has been that after you're arrested, the police can without a warrant lawfully search you and the immediate area under your control. The lawful objectives of that search are either officer safety or preservation of evidence. If you're arrested while driving a vehicle, and either of those objectives militate a search of the passenger compartment of your car, the police can search the passenger compartment of your car. * The argument was made here in an earlier hearing that the cell phone search occurred as part of an "inventory" search; this is one of the contexts in which cell phones were claimed to be a "container". But the controlling appellate opinion here rejected that interpretation; the police cannot search a cell phone to "inventory" its contents. * But that is a moot point if you are arrested, because the police are explicitly entitled to search your person and your car for evidence if you're arrested. Don't get arrested! Here we have the second "phone-as-container" context: the phone is a container for evidence of crimes. It's this interpretation that the appellate court affirmed, and reasonably so! * More importantly, in this particular case, this guy was screwed from the get-go. He was arrested for driving a car without a license, for which he could not document lawful possession, after doing 90MPH in a 65, on suspicion (later validated) of being under the influence, accompanied by a clearly intoxicated passenger. When the police searched his car incident to the arrest, they found a loaded gun in the car under the drivers seat, along with drug paraphernalia. Then they found the Blackberry with the screensaver set to the guy holding two assault rifles. Face it. That phone was getting searched. The notion that searching the phone pushes the bounds of "incident to arrest" searches is at best a technicality; under the same pattern of facts, a warrant for the search would be a no-brainer as well. * ...but it seems extremely dubious to argue that this is even a real technicality. A search of your car is a big deal. The police are not lawfully entitled to invade the privacy of your car without reason. Getting arrested is a big deal. The police are not lawfully entitled to arrest you for no reason (there is a world of difference between arrest and mere "detention"). The search the police get to conduct when they arrest you is explicitly not limited to officer safety (like the weapons search frisk of a Terry stop). This guy's lawyer argues that the phone search was out of bounds because of an expectation of privacy. What expectation of privacy? They're in your car. They found your gun and your secret drug shit. Your privacy is largely out the window. Your trunk might, for a few minutes, be out of bounds because it's not necessarily your trunk. But the phone with your dumbass picture on it holding assault rifles is clearly yours. Someone downthread had the right practical response to this: lock your phone. There's no secret software the police have that will suck all the info off an iPhone with a 6-digit PIN. Politely decline consent for searches. Do not get in a police officer's face; if you give them a justification to arrest you for any reason, all bets are off. Don't get arrested.

georgefox 15y ago

I expected to see a lot of Steve Jobs-related posts on HN today, but I did not expect a sensationalist article from a Glenn Beck website to make the front page.

georgieporgie 15y ago

Flagged for being a wildly inaccurate, inflammatory headline.