US Supreme Court to decide if cops can search mobes without a warrant

Re: Locked Phones

No. This is the Land of The Free so you're given the right to refuse handing over your PIN. By exercising that right you're walking in the footsteps of great men who made certain you would have that right. You'll have plenty of time to contemplate it all as prison libraries have racks of American History books.

Re: Locked Phones

Maybe phones need an option for "if I don't unlock this phone for x hours, wipe". Then you only need to wait out that timeout before providing the code to police. If the timeout is short enough (12 hours would work for most) your lawyer can probably stall things quite nicely. By the time your lawyer's objections are overcome and you provide the code it is too late.

To prevent the "put it in a Faraday cage bag to prevent remote wipes" plan, a second option for "if no radio signal received for x hours, wipe".

Of course, there's always the "alternate unlock code that unlocks the phone and wipes it at the same time".

Just make sure if you keep backups of your phone to avoid losing everything when arrested that you use an offshore cloud provider. China would be a good choice for those of us living in the US/UK.

This may all be for naught though, as in general I suspect the most incriminating info on the phone will be call history and text messages, which the police can get from your telco....

Re: Locked Phones

I have my phone set to erase itself after the 10th failed auth attempt. Wish I could set it to three. In the event I am ever asked for the pass word, I will feign com

Re: Locked Phones

Not in the UK.

RIPA trumps privilege.

Re: Scope

you have less rights the minute you travel to 'the land of the free'.

for a start you are treated as a criminal the minute you get off the plane and are subject to having to be finger printed, and having them given over to the FBI/CIA forever.

unlike joe smoe american who's prints will not be on record (assuming not criminal record).

We should have implemented quid-pro-quo over here for american citizens imho. maybe adding a cavity inspection, and a general knowledge test before letting them into the country. I'd start with 'how many sides does a triangle have' and 'name a country beginning with U':

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RH0cYs4lw

Re: The 4th Amendment no longer exists

Yep the War on Drugs did a good job on it but what finished off the dying dog 4th Amendment with a full drum clip was the War on Terror™. Off topic slightly but it looks like the new boogie man is going to be the old one we always were sadly comfortable with, big bad Russia. Repeat after me, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

Re: The 4th Amendment no longer exists

ecofeco, the key word in the Fourth is unreasonable. Since the word isn’t explicitly defined in the Constitution, Congress gets to define it (with occasional input from the Supreme Court), and the President gets to enforce its most recent definition. Detesting the current definition of unreasonable or how that definition is enforced does not mean that the Fourth no longer exists.

Re: The 4th Amendment no longer exists

This really should be a no-brainer. The police have the person in custody, and they have the phone. They can wrap it in foil and keep it in a metal box until they manage convince a judge of the need for a warrant, showing probable cause to believe the phone contains information relevant to criminal activity.

Re: I'll wager that the SCOTUS sides with the convicts.

And so they should - the world is actually no different than it was 40+ years ago. The whole point of the protections in the US Constitution is to make it hard for the State to override the interests of the individual. The weakening of the protections has led to an unwarranted (pun genuinely not intended) intrusion of the lower parts of the State apparatus (police in this case) being able to breach reasonable privacy rights without the correct recourse through a judge (though some of the small-town judges are so far up the arses of the local plod that they are indistinguishable from them).

Unfortunately, I don't share your analysis of the likely outcome - the Supreme Court has become the enabler of the continual erosion of rights. They are more likely to give carte blanche to the police to increase their reach.