Supreme Court to decide if police need a warrant to search your phone
The only people on earth that probably don’t realize (or care) how many laws this breaks or how many constitutional rights it goes against are of course the group tasked with making the decision. I am fairly certain if you asked any citizen of the US if this was something under any circumstance that should be allowed, the answer would be a resounding NO. However the powers that be aren’t so sure. They have already made it clear they do not need any type of warrant to track your phone, so I would think searching it with no warrant or reasonable cause would be the next power they are granted. Worst case scenario they will just need to change the definition of a few more laws to lean in their favor first.
Although the court hasn’t scheduled the relevant hearings at this point, if history is anything to go by, the ruling they will give when it does happen is almost assuredly going to be that this does not violate any laws and that police have full authority to conduct said searches regardless of any warrant. Sounds pretty scary right? It is. If passed, the next time you get pulled over, the officer could simply say to hand over your phone and search through every thing on it. Every picture, every text message, your Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc. Seriously think for a second about the amount of personal information you put into your phone. All of which could be pilfered through by your local PD because you had a tail light out.
Paints a rather grim picture of enforcement in the future. As if that didn’t already look stark enough. The only thing I can recommend is using your right to remain silent. If you have your phone locked with a password to get into it, there are not any (current) laws that require you to divulge that information to the officer demanding it. The only bit of irony here is that this is already taking place on massive scale in real time via the NSA, as they already have all the information on your phone stored on a server that is constantly updated. This would just be the face to face version.
Ben Johnson
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