What the Supreme Court ruling on cell phone seizure really means

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Yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling was a major win for privacy groups and has some serious implications for law enforcement going forward. Before jumping into why this was an important decision, let’s talk about the law as it existed before yesterday’s ruling.

Previously, cell phones did not fall under Fourth Amendment rights, which assert that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” should be protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Of course, if law enforcement is able to show probable cause for search and obtain a warrant, those conditions are nullified.

That means police are able to search your phone on the spot if you get pulled over for a traffic violation or if you’re stopped and frisked. Allowing police to seize cell phones also prevented citizens from using a powerful tool for police accountability: cameras. In instances of police brutality, certain officers have seized cell phones from bystanders or asked that they delete evidence of misconduct.

The worst part about cell phones not being included in Fourth Amendment rights was that it gave police access to unprecedented amounts of personal information.

“A decade ago, officers might have occasionally stumbled across a highly personal item such as a diary, but today many more than 90 percent of American adults who own cell phones keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives,” reads the Supreme Court opinion. Simply put: search and seizure legislation wasn’t written for 2014 but for a time when searching someone’s person would only have been a “narrow invasion of privacy.”

Now, searching the items immediately on you is a deep invasion of your privacy. As a result the Supreme Court now requires law enforcement to get a warrant to go through your phone — not just an arrest. There are of course “exigent” reasons your phone would be seized, like if there was an immediate threat of harm. Perhaps a broader question is, what does this mean for other devices?

Tablets are already everywhere; and wearables, like smartwatches and Google Glass, are slowly making their entry into the market, which means soon we’ll have to worry about police seizing a range of devices, not just our cell phones. Why would an officer of the law want to take your fitness tracker with a log of your recent locations? Or a smartwatch with a store of recent texts?

Hanni Fakhoury, staff lawyer at Electronic Freedom Foundation, says yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling begins to tackle that issue.

“Now, police cannot search a cell phone merely because a person has been arrested. If you're carrying a digital camera, there's a very good argument that that ruling can be extended,” says Hanni Fakhoury, staff lawyer at Electronic Freedom Foundation. Same for Google Glass, he says.

However, this new rule won’t protect you from being pressured into giving your device to police if they ask for it. Also, warrants are not that hard to obtain, though they certainly weigh down the search process with paper work and a judge’s approval.

And though this new legislation recognizes that people store vast amounts of personal information on the web and in their phones, it doesn’t answer larger questions about Internet and cloud data privacy. Fakhoury is hopeful that this new ruling will affect police searches of phone records.

“Police rely on going to the cell phone companies for information and going to Internet service providers for even more information. This new law will impact that litigation” he says — though that seems like a bit of a stretch. At the very least the Supreme Court requirement that law enforcement obtain a warrant before securing a person’s cell phones could open the door to more legislation of this ilk.

This new legislation is a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go in protecting our personal data.

Recruit Your Robots with “Take Control of Automating Your Mac”

If you use copy and paste, you're taking advantage of an important shortcut. But did you realize that the Mac offers dozens of additional shortcuts that make tedious tasks quick, accurate, and repeatable? Author Joe Kissell reveals OS X's many shortcuts and examines the utilities that go further, offering concrete examples and extensive lists of possibilities.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

THP Hacker Bio: David Cook

[David Cook] has been on the front page with gnarly hacks many times. We’re happy to present his Hackaday Projects profile as this week’s Hacker Bio.

His entry for The Hackaday Prize is something of a one-wireless-pair-to-rule-them approach to connected devices which he calls LoFi. We were delighted by his first demo video which is exactly what we envisioned for preliminary entries; [David] explains the concept and how he plans to implement it using a few visual aids to drive the point home.

Join us after the break to find out more about [David]. Oh, if you’re wondering about the times he’s been featured on Hackaday, check out his capacitor/coin cell swap which is one of our favorites.

Robotics, machining, and electronics.

Writing commercial software.

Applied science. When are we going to get to Mars! What does Pluto look like close-up? Is there gold in them asteroids?

When my wife and I were young, naïve, and first married, we were duped by a plumbing company that redid all of the pipes in our first home and yard. Needless to say, there were leaks popping up everywhere whenever the weather changed. I know it doesn't seem like the right image, of a crazed man beating the copper pipes in his basement with a baseball bat, but there it is. Another leak!?! Are you kidding me??

Apple DOS 3.3. That's when I first learned to program. I have fond memories of Apple BASIC, Beagle Bros, and GPLE. One of my "I finally made it" moments was when Woz bought a copy of my game MacSki. Wherever you are, thanks Woz. [Image Source: Walker Sampson]

I have a beautiful Metcal soldering iron that my brother gave me. There is always a homemade current-controlled LED tester and ring-lit magnifying glass on my desk. However, I won't name my multimeter, oscilloscope, power supply, or digital camera, because I'm disappointed in them and they know why.

Atmel AVR 8-bit line. I prefer the old Motorola 68HC08 CISC von Neumann architecture, but Atmel really cares for their product line and the hobbyist community.

I love C#. The generic collections border on magic. Before that, I was a big fan of C, but now I'm spoiled.

At this point in the interview I need to provide you with a picture of my closets, basement, and boxes on my floor. Then you'll understand why I say "I can only pick three??? Do time-freezing, self-replication, or super-speed count?"

[David's] machining project to motorize a PCB shear.

Machining metal, without a doubt. You have no idea how satisfying it is to chip metal from a block to make something real that you had only imagined. Cut, sore, and greasy hands don't feel so bad when they're holding an unusual bracket you made for your robot. Runner up would be growing your own food. Both are very innate.

There are lots of things I'd like to measure or monitor, but I just don't have the time to make all of those projects. So, a compact universal reader (no programming, no custom boards) and transmitter allows me to satisfy most of those desires with a budget that my wife won't frown upon.

Probably the Javascript to read and set configurations using Chrome.Serial. I can do it, but I hate Javascript. God! I have a typo in there but you aren't going to tell me until someone tries to use it? And even then there won't be an error message? Sorry Javascript, it's not me, it's you.

I'd like a solid home router with better firmware. I hear hints of such things, but I'd like to see someone pull it together.

I'd love a private payload delivery system to the Moon. How many long weekends do you think would that take?

Family, programming, m&ms, writing, games

Hack A Day is cool.

Filed under: Hackaday Columns, The Hackaday Prize

The iFind Kickstarter Campaign Was Just Suspended

A little more than one month ago we featured a Kickstarter campaign that was raising quite a lot of eyebrows and over half a million dollars. This particular product was a battery-free tag meant to be attached to anything you may lose in your daily life. It was supposed to communicate with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices and have a 200ft (60m) detection range.

The main claim was that the iFind could harvest enough power from existing RF fields inside a typical home environment to operate for centuries. As Kickstarter just cancelled its funding a few minutes ago it seems that the basic maths Hackaday did a while ago were correct and that the project was in fact a scam. We’ll direct our readers to this particular comment that sums up all the elements pointing to a fraudulent campaign and show you the email that the backers received:

A review of the project uncovered evidence of one or more violations of Kickstarter’s rules, which include:

• A related party posing as an independent, supportive party in project comments or elsewhere
• Misrepresenting support by pledging to your own project
• Misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator
• Providing inaccurate or incomplete user information to Kickstarter or one of our partners

Putting aside this news, this campaign’s cancellation raises a bigger question: why didn’t it happen before and how could we control Kickstarter campaigns? On a side note, it’s still very interesting to notice the nearly religious fervor of the sunk cost fallacy that such campaigns create in their comments.

Filed under: Ask Hackaday, Crowd Funding

Making Flexible Wood Using a Laser Cutter

If you’re one of the lucky ones who has access to a laser cutter, you’re definitely going to want to check out [Aaron Porterfield's] latest work. He’s been experimenting with making flexible wood.

We’ve all probably seen wood cut with slots added to allow flexibility in a single direction, but did you know with the use of lattice hinges you can do so much more? [Aaron's] been playing around with parametric patterns and has made some really cool examples — the best part is, he’s sharing them all for free (both .DXF and vector files)!

His main goal was to create a pattern that is in flexible in multiple directions, which he almost achieved — but the really cool thing he figured out was creating a pre-formed curved surface by mapping the bend in Photoshop first…

This is an example of the result — he’s provided full instructions on how to do this yourself which opens up a world of new possibilities — again, only if you have a laser cutter though. We can all dream though.

Filed under: laser hacks

Hackaday Reddit AMA (ask me anything) Happening Right Now

Today we’re interacting on an “Ask Me Anything” over at Reddit.

Now’s the time to ask your question about all-things-Hackaday. No topic is off limits. Wonder how the Blog operates? What’s the deal with Hackaday Projects? Need an answer to questions about The Hackaday Prize? Just ask!

[Mike Szczys] started the thread and I’ve provided proof as seen here, but most of the writing staff are Reddit regulars so questions for specific writers are welcome as well. What’s on your mind?

Filed under: news

Dylan’s Desk: Our phones have a constitutional right to privacy. It’s up to us to use it

Above: If only it were so easy to enable privacy on our mobile devices.

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The Supreme Court ruling yesterday that police cannot search your phone without a warrant is a recognition of what most of us already know intuitively: Our phones are deeply personal extensions of ourselves. As such, they deserve the same level of privacy protection as our own homes.

Now if only the companies that make those phones would see things the same way.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the unanimous opinion, cell phones are “now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” The court recognized the vast amount of information these devices contain — or provide access to, via the cloud — and the potential for that information to reveal every detail about a person’s life. In fact, a search of your phone would reveal far more about you than a full search of your house would, the court noted.

“The sum of an individual’s private life can be reconstructed through a thousand photographs labeled with dates, locations, and descriptions; the same cannot be said of a photograph or two of loved ones tucked into a wallet,” the court wrote.

Legal protection against warrantless searches is one thing, and a very important thing it is. But the niceties of the law only go so far, particularly when, as we know, there are spy agencies that regularly tap our communications without a warrant — or with the most superficial oversight and blanket approvals of a secret court. Yes, that blanket approval is changing, as the courts and Congress move to restrict the NSA’s purview. But the fact remains that much of what we do with our phones can be and often is monitored and searched.

We need better protections. And not just against government intrusions: We need to protect ourselves, if we choose, from the very companies that make our phones and the software that runs on them. Time and again we have learned that our phones, or their apps, are tracking us, collecting data on us that they don’t need. That may be harmless now, since that data is primarily being used to determine which ads to show you — which you will ignore anyway. But any large collection of deeply personal data on millions of people is a rich target for bad actors of all kinds: hackers, less-principled corporations, out-of-control surveillance states, or in some parts of the world, dictators.

As tech journalist Quinn Norton recently wrote, everything is broken when it comes to security — badly broken. Everything is riddled with holes and vulnerabilities of various kinds that, if exploited, give attackers complete control of your devices and your data. Heartbleed was a security disaster of epic proportions, but it was mostly just better publicized than other, similarly disastrous vulnerabilities. The only question is whether those vulnerabilities have been found yet and are being used against you.

Why do we put up with this shoddiness? Partly it’s because most of us don’t care. We don’t have a sense of privacy for our own devices, or we don’t worry about it, because we don’t do anything with them — or don’t believe we do — that could embarrass us or get us in trouble.

Partly, also, it is because we value convenience so highly. Automatically syncing your email, contracts, and calendar? Sign me up. Backing up all your photos to the cloud? Wonderful.

Wonderful, that is, until hackers use that very interconnectedness to delete all your family photos.

It is time for us to demand more. If the Supreme Court recognizes how deeply personal and private our phones are to us, maybe we should too.

“There are plenty of schemes that could federate or safely encrypt our data, plenty of ways we could regain privacy and make our computers work better by default,” Norton wrote. “It isn't happening now because we haven't demanded that it should, not because no one is clever enough to make that happen.”

Let’s demand it. If the highest court in the U.S. can figure out that privacy is needful when it comes to our phones, maybe it’s time for us to wake up to that need.

Technology does not have a mind of its own, and it does not evolve by itself, independent of human intervention. We have choices. Let’s make them.