A recent appeals court ruling allows police to gather data from a cell phone without getting a warrant.  The case in question had police finding three cell phones during a drug arrest, turning them on, and recording the phone numbers so that call records for those numbers could be obtained.  The judge seems to draw a fuzzy line between getting this kind of information and searching for calling, browsing, and email information without a warrant.  There’s some point where the police would go too far, but he doesn’t seem to make that point very clear.

If you’re carrying a cell phone, especially a smart phone, then you are carrying around a device that holds a highly concentrated dose of your private information. Who you email, text or call, what pages you surf to, and any searches on the GPS are all there for anyone to see who can get to it.  And if this decision is affirmed by higher courts, it means that the police can take basic information from your phone, use that to find other information, then possibly use that information to get a warrant in order to go further into the phone.

I’d be interested to see what putting a hard-to-guess passcode on your phone would do.  My iPhone doesn’t give its phone number unless its unlocked, and of course you can’t get to the higher functions of the phone while it’s locked.  Recent court rulings hold that a defendant can be compelled to decrypt a hard drive, so I’m guessing that a defendant could be compelled to unlock a phone or face additional charges of contempt.

In the same vein, using any application that would wipe a phone remotely could be construed as destroying evidence, dragging whoever runs it into your trouble even deeper than they may already be.  All the authorities have to do is compel your cell provider or phone vendor to show records of access to your account.

And remember, the authorities are much less likely to get hold of your phone than Sumdood is.  Getting your contacts, personal information, passwords, and banking information would certainly make his day.  Safeguarding your data against him and his ilk is at least as important as keeping it safe from Officer RoidRage.

 So what can we do?

The only thing I can think of is to lock your phone and get a lawyer.  I’m sure there are a lot more things you can do, and a lot of shades of gray in all of these.  To be honest, I still believe that a majority of police aren’t out to mess with the populace in general, but there’s always that one guy.   Taking a few steps before there’s a problem can mean that you control when the information on your phone becomes available to the police, and you can do it under advice of counsel.

In other news, the privacy war marches on.

In California, Governor Brown vetoed a bill that would have required police to get a warrant before searching someone’s cell phone, including using it to access on-line information such as emails, journals, location data, mobile banking data, and cloud storage.  Let’s say you get arrested for drunk driving.  Fair enough, you did it, you got caught, you get arrested.  No problem so far.  The police search your car, find nothing illegal in it, so they open up your phone, find out everyone you’ve talked to recently, read all of your emails, look at where you’ve taken your cell phone in the last few weeks, and take a look at all of the things you read online or the files you keep on the net.  Those alarm bells you hear is your mind reminding you of how easy it is to break some little portion of some obscure law these days.  Maybe all they’ll do is snicker at your browsing habits on Amazon, or maybe they’ll report to DHS because you have been emailing back and forth in tech speak to your co-worker from Pakistan.  Either way, they’re going to use the portable magic elf box to dig through a lot of the nooks and crannies of your life.

People, even if all you have is the default security software on your phone, use it.  Set your phone to lock when not in use, and use an unlocking code that isn’t easy to guess.  Yeah, it won’t keep a determined guy in a lab out, but it’ll keep the nice officer on the side of the road from reading your text messages.

Next, we have something that really pisses me off.  The Justice Department has forced Google and another on-line service provider to give up the contact information of everyone a person, who may or may not be associated with the WikiLeaks organization, has corresponded with for two years.  The full text of the emails sent was not requested, so the government is apparently doing a bit of network and schedule analysis on the email traffic.  What gets me is that they didn’t have to get a warrant to do this. All they had to do was get a court order that states that the companies have to turn this information over. For a bonus point, they did this without informing the person that they were under surveillance.  So we’ve got a government agency forcing two companies to provide surveillance information on a citizen without a warrant and without informing the citizen that the order has been made.  For me, that’s a non-starter breach of the 4th Amendment.  If the government wants to know who I’m communicating with, then they should have to convince a judge that I’m breaking the law and  have them issue a search warrant, which should be served to me so that I know that the government is poking around in my life.  Getting the exterior information of my communications and using it to figure out who is talking to whom and when is just as intrusive as reading the actual content of the traffic itself.  The law that authorizes this behavior needs to be declared unconstitutional and thrown in the river with a cement block tied to it.

Don’t get me wrong.  If law enforcement feels that someone needs to be checked out as part of a criminal case, then they should have the tools to look for evidence of these crimes.  But the principle of the warrant should be followed at all times.  Prove that there is cause for someone’s privacy to be violated, get a warrant, and follow it.  All other things seem to erode the part of the social contract that says that the government should stay out of our lives unless it is absolutely necessary for them to intrude.

Yes, I know that it is absolutely trivial in a technical sense for anyone to see anything we do on-line.  But there’s a big difference between what is technically feasible, what is legal, and what is ethical.  The government should have big, clear, bold lines that say “Further than this, thou shalt not go” on them when it comes to the privacy of citizens.  Anything that makes those lines fuzzier adds grease to an already slippery slope.