Cellphone Ruling is of little significance
Cellphone Ruling is of little significance
While it may result in tossing some existing cases, police are easily changing their procedures to follow the ruling from now on.
Often search warrants can be obtained in a few hours during business hours a bit longer to find a judge in the middle of the night.
LE might give an arrested escort a choice, a ticket if you give consent to search your cell phone or go to jail, hold up to 72 hours without charges and get a search warrant. So the choice may be handcuffed and booked vs. a ticket. As personal property on the person or in possession they can take the phone the issue is just if they search it immediately or have to wait until they get a search warrant. But can jail the escort in the meantime.
However, typically what is on your phone is irrelevant to an arrest itself but may hold further evidence and used by LE to pretend to be the escort and entrap others.
There seems to be no time limit on how long they can hold your phone, they just can not look at the contents until they get a search warrant.
The Springfield Police noted that the court's ruling doesn't affect law enforcement's ability to seize the phone while they pursue a warrant to search it.- Springfield News-Leader 6/26/2014
After a search warrant is obtained it seems LE may use the phone to try and sting or use as evidence against others, provide false references etc., with a female officer pretending to be the sexworker people think they are talking to.
There is strong evidence this has been done in Phoenix and that P411 may have been infiltrated this way. P411 seems more interested in accusing people of spreading rumors and lies than investigating when there is strong evidence LE is posing on P411 taking over an escorts identity. TER and BP seems more directly allowing LE vs P411 that pretends to offer some safety but seems to be working against it.
The Denver post 6/25/14: A big fear is whether people will be able to remotely erase a cell phone's memory while police wait to get a warrant. The court instructed police to place the phones in bags that can block signals while they await warrants. There is a concerned about the reliability and effectiveness of the bags on the market and the question asked "Can someone remotely erase the phone and, therefore, erase potential evidence?"
They can obtain similar information by using their own cellphone-tracking technology or by obtaining data from cellular-service providers. Through tracking, law enforcement agencies can determine whether a phone has been in any given area at any given time. Additionally, they can access further information, such as call logs and text messages from the service provider.
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