Score one for the Fourth Amendment.
The Supreme Court just ruled unanimously in two decisions that police officers can’t search the cell phone of someone they’ve stopped or arrested unless they have a warrant. That’s true even if the cops suspect that the phone has data that’s relevant to the crime.
Police are already allowed to search “physical objects” that might be on a suspect’s person — for example, in his pockets. But the key point in today’s decisions was that (in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion) there’s a “qualitative and quantitative” difference between cell phones and other physical objects.
In other words, cell phones are different just because of how much information they can store or access, and because of how personal that information is.
Seems a bit of a deliberate and largely meaningless to law enforcement tactic considering the totality of the importance of the object in question. You can still be tracked, recorded and your real-time conversations can be vacuumed up (along with every other cell phone conversation) within range of either of the two sting-ray devices, known to be deployed for use in our great state. Law enforcement likely has all they need if you are engaged in or suspected of engaging in any criminal activity before they stop someone.
Wonder if there is a record of the governor’s cell phone conversations that DA’s should be requesting from the NSA or others.
Meant to type: deliberate diversion in the opening sentence.