U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in two cases testing whether police can search cellphones without a warrant at the time of an arrest, be it for a traffic violation or a felony.
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches to require that police obtain a search warrant from a neutral judge upon a showing that there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed. The warrant is to specify where the search will be conducted and the evidence being sought.
There are, however, exceptions to the warrant requirement.
The court has long allowed police to search people without a warrant at the time of their arrest. But as privacy advocate Andrew Pincus points out, until very recently, those searches were self-limiting, meaning they were limited by the amount of information an individual could carry on his person.
Now, however, because cellphones can store so much information, a person can carry more than any one of the Founding Fathers had amassed in a lifetime.
"The Library of Congress' entire collection of James Madison's papers is 72,000 pages," Pincus observes, adding, "he couldn't have carried them. They would have weighed 675 pounds." And, says Pincus, today's cellphones carry 100 times that much information.
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Right. It takes a Supreme Court justice to figure out that if the cops stop you for SPEEDING or they "smelled marijuana", you must be be controlling your accelerator with your phone, or have drug stashed in your cell ph battery pack.
ReplyDeleteOh right. They aren't REALLY looking for evidence of the crime you are being ticketed for, or even arrested. They are looking to do a "blanket" search for SOMETHING, even if it's just to compile a database of information.
Which, even to a dummy like me, is a VERY CLEAR violation of the 4th Amendment.
Apparently, though, I'm not the only dummy, or the biggest one. Why? Because most of you don't ever think of the larger picture. All you can do is
keep cheering.
keep cheering about what exactly?
ReplyDeleteOk. 10:11. Keep cheering for the evaporation of the Bill of Rights. The loss of any protection of the citizenry against heavy handed and broadly defined government power. Keep cheering laws that are supposed to keep you "safe" but are really designed to raise revenue or limit your ability to resist or protest ("free speech zones"??). Keep cheering things like Nazi "checkpoints", where the right to travel freely and be free of warrantless searches has been deemed not a "right" any longer, but a "priviledge" granted to you by your rulers. Keep cheering your "representatives", who, somehow, someway, increase their wealth by several million dollars (or more) "serving" in a job that pays $100,000 a year.
ReplyDeleteKeep cheering "your guy" in Congress that promises to "change things", while your taxes, fees, fines, and surcharges continue to dramatically CLIMB every year.
Cheer the States Attoney's that watch the biggest gang in the country kill, rob, rape, assualt, and steal unabated and with no consequences, while they IMPRISON citizens for the same offenses.
Keep cheering the "authorities" who tell you they have the power and the right to record EVERY call text and e-mail you send and receive (to "protect" you, lol) and to take your photogragh dozens of times a year, again, for your "protection.
Keep cheering SECRET and UNLIMITED detention od AMERICAN CITIZENS.
Start paying attention.