LWN: Comments on "Security quotes of the week"

[S]earch warrants are required to search mobile phones

erwbgy — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 21:07:19 +0000

The message on the lock screen helped someone notify me when my phone was found a few weeks after I lost it and had left the country. (Thank you Sarah Hucker.) Unfortunately Fedex lost it when it was posted to me...

Searching a phone

man_ls — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 23:17:57 +0000

I am missing a "favorite" button, or even better: a "nominate for QotW" for your comment.

[S]earch warrants are required to search mobile phones

fb — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 11:10:26 +0000

On a tangentially related note, bonus points for Android not only because it is trivial to encrypt the device while already in use but because it allows you to display a custom text message at the lock screen.

My Nexus displayed something like "if found contact foo@gmail.com, or call 912345678".

[S]earch warrants are required to search mobile phones

josh — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 19:21:46 +0000

That said, keep your laptop *and* your cell phone encrypted; don't rely solely on legal protections.

[S]earch warrants are required to search mobile phones

rgmoore — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 18:40:10 +0000

I'm not sure if the exception the police were trying to rely on in this case would have applied to laptops in the first place. The police in this case were relying on an exception that applied to "search incident to arrest". When the police arrest somebody, they're allowed to search the area under that person's immediate control- basically their person and anything they can easily reach- to make sure they don't have any weapons or means of escape. If there's anything that might be evidence, the police are also allowed to take it out of the arrestee's control so he can't destroy it. If they turned up something else in the course of the search- frequently illegal drugs in the arrestee's pockets- it was usable as evidence, but in theory the search was supposed to be limited to protecting the police and any potentially destroyable evidence.

What the court ruled in this case is that looking at the cell phone is limited to making sure that it's a cell phone, not examining its contents. Once the police are convinced that it's a phone, they aren't allowed to look at it in more detail. The same should apply to laptops; once they know it's a laptop, they aren't allowed to power it on and look through the contents. Some police officer may try to get around that by claiming the Supreme Court was only talking about phones and not laptops, but they're not going to get very far. It doesn't always seem that way, but courts are encouraged to use logic in drawing obvious conclusions from previous cases, and they aren't going buy that argument for a minute.

Searching a phone

robbe — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:41:16 +0000

Good that users are encouraged to keep more and more data in the cloud, where law enforcement can access it under much more shoddy premises, because the party whose data is accessed does not even need to know!

[S]earch warrants are required to search mobile phones

mathstuf — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:00:16 +0000

From the bits I've read, it looks like they're tying it to "digital devices" (note the language about them being computers that happen to be able to place calls), so if you do get caught up, getting a court to read it as covering laptops should be easy. Or, rather, as easy as you could want. The clearest outcome would be for it to happen, a circuit rule it as not allowed and the Supreme Court refuse to take the appeal and let it stand.

[S]earch warrants are required to search mobile phones

Max.Hyre — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 03:14:26 +0000

I've seen no comment on how this affects (if at all) warrant requirements for other portable devices—notably laptops. I'm taken aback that not one of the news reports asked the question of their sources.

Anybody seen (or know of) anything abuout how this decision speaks to laptops?