on California's police state

[acroyear]

Court: No warrant needed to search cell phone - The Red Tape Chronicles - msnbc.com:

Posted: Tuesday, January 4 2011 at 05:45 pm CT by Bob Sullivan

The next time you're in California, you might not want to bring your cell phone with you. The California Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can search the cell phone of a person who's been arrested -- including text messages -- without obtaining a warrant, and use that data as evidence.

Keep in mind that this is just the state court applying the state's constitution.  State courts are not required to apply the standards of the Federal Constitution in making their decisions on such matters so it is possible, even likely, that the judge simply ignored SCOTUS precedents on such matters.  Now that this appeals process is done, the defendant can appeal to the Federal court process, where it will go through 3 more trials (local, 9th District, and SCOTUS).

This is a critical issue, in that a phone today is no longer a self-contained object.  It may have cached SMS messages tucked into it, but it also has full access to email servers that may not reside in the state and therefore are out of jurisdiction of the local and state police's investigations.  It also likely will have saved passwords for websites the owner regularly visits - even if the police can't get the paswords, they can get access to the websites they otherwise would need a separate warrant for.

Short term, consider a general password/passcode that's required to even just open your phone, as long as you're in the state.

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

so it all comes down to "unreasonable". California does not think it means what the rest of us thinks it means.