Appeals Court Ruling: It's legal for the police to impersonate you, read your texts

Oryx

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    ...On a seized phone. (ran out of room in the title D; )

    A federal appeals court held that the pager owner's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were not violated because the pager is "nothing more than a contemporary receptacle for telephone numbers," akin to an address book. The court also held that someone who sends his phone number to a pager has no reasonable expectation of privacy because he can't be sure that the pager will be in the hands of its owner.

    Judge Penoyar said that the same reasoning applies to text messages sent to an iPhone. While text messages may be legally protected in transit, he argued that they lose privacy protections once they have been delivered to a target device in the hands of the police. He claimed that the same rule applied to letters and e-mail. (Police would still need to seize or search a phone or computer legally, and phones are much easier for cops to seize than computers, which generally require a warrant.)
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    I don't know whether to be shocked or resigned to the way the US is headed. A smartphone is just a small computer. If they can't search computers and impersonate you over instant messages or email, it should be the same with phones.

    Thoughts?
     
    Yeh, it is pretty stupid. A smart phone is, as you said, a small computer and texting is not really different from instant messaging on a computer, or even emails.

    It is just a loop hole they are looking for, I guess.​
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    Who uses pagers anymore? I don't like the judge's reasoning. An iPhone or similar device is a personal computer. Just a smaller version. Why should phones be easier for them to search than personal computers? This judge seems like they're at least a decade behind the rest of us with technology.

    And they can impersonate you? It's one thing if they seize your phone, but that shouldn't give them the right to seize your account with the phone like that and use it on their own.
     
    I'm not shocked by this at all. The judge seem not to realize pagers haven't been anywhere in sight in the last 10 years. Smartphones are little computers and someone needs to tell that judge this.
     
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