Lynnifer: May 2011

Technology and Your Fourth-Amendment Rights

By Alex Daley

Officer: “Do you know why I pulled you over?”

Driver: “I think I was going a little fast coming down that hill. I was just slowing down. Sorry, but…”

Officer: “License, registration and cell phone, please.”

Next time you are pulled over, don’t be surprised if a police officer asks for your cell phone. That’s apparently what’s started in Michigan, where police are employing a new piece of technology in their war against lead-footed menaces.

According to a complaint aired by the ACLU, Michigan State Police have launched a pilot program, having traffic cops search mobile phone data from speeders using this fancy gadget:

Sold by a company called Cellebrite, the “UFED” can download pretty much anything and everything from most models of phones: texts, photos, videos, even GPS data. The devices are equipped with adapters for connecting to most major brands of phones, and can even uncover information like the physical keypad lock code and internal diagnostics that track past SIM cards in use.

The device takes a dump of any phone memory it can access (on some phones, that’s a complete dump of everything) and stores it for offline analysis using the company’s desktop software back at the police station. There, police can read your call history, play your videos, or even recover previously deleted files in some cases.

There are certainly some uses for such a device, say, in analyzing the cell phone of a suspected drug dealer after his lawful arrest. But in Michigan the police have allegedly been using the device to download information from the cell phones of drivers pulled over for speeding, even when not suspected of any other crime.

The ACLU contends (and your author for one agrees completely) that downloading the contents of a person’s cell phone without probable cause or a search warrant is a clear violation of 4^th Amendment rights. The organization has requested access to the logs from devices in use by the MSP, so they can determine what if anything has been downloaded, and what rights may have been trampled on, through the Freedom of Information Act.

And Michigan police are happy to comply. For a small administrative fee, of course. Just $544,680. For five devices.

The ACLU, understandably perturbed “that Michigan State Police would rather play this stalling game than respect the public’s right to know,” have tried to narrow their requests to reduce the costs of fulfilling it, only to be given the runaround on when and where the devices have been used. After years of haggling back and forth behind the scenes, the ACLU is now bringing its case to the court of public opinion in an attempt to clear these roadblocks and continue its investigation.

We can only hope that they have some success curbing any abuses that might be occurring before these devices start winding up in the patrol cars of police around the nation.

This article was copied from http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/technology-and-your-fourth-amendment-rights