I think we’re in general agreement, but I also don’t think you get the entirety of what I’m saying. Forget the 10,000 user system – a single user system has your banking, e-mail, Facebook traffic, Match.com profiles, unfinished novel, the erotica you like to post under an assumed name at NakedErnestBorgnine.com, and the pictures you took that Saturday when you hooked up with the skinny chick with the tatoos.
And if the police have a warrant to search it, it’s ALL open to their eyes. That is, to use your analogy, one freakin big car trunk.
Well in fairness the skinny chick had an Ernest Borgnine fetish. We agree. That’s also an example of why modular security is important. If every site has it’s own differentiated password, and the browser is set up not to remember passwords, well they may have browser history and bookmarks, but they don’t have access to those sites. They’d know I’d visited match.com, facebook, NakedErnestBorgnine.com, the bank site, but they wouldn’t know what I did there, other than maybe page titles, unless they fished something out of the cache (also a security hazard that should be properly configured). Further browser history can be configured on how long it keeps things.
Further using tools like keepass, and a portable drive to store the encrypted database keeps password management easy, and secure. That’s just good security anyway. Otherwise any rogue malware that happens to get on your computer could get your banking password.
The tattoo chick pics? Well, that is a major problem, but the Earnest Bornine stash mixed in ought to ruin any jolies they get.
Although I forgot to add a key logger could get it anyway if you manually type it. Keepass has a feature that can greatly help with that (though a smarter keylogger could still get it).
Anyway I’m gonna shh on the computer security hijack now.
<IANAL>
That’s fine. You can willingly surrender anything you want to anyone you want to whatever end you want. You’re missing the point, which is whether the law permits the police to extract this data without your consent.
If the police claim they can pull your data as part of a traffic stop without a warrant, that’s not right because there’s nothing in a traffic stop that would require such examination. If they have a warrant and have pulled you over for some bullshit excuse (or not) in order to execute the warrant, it’s a different story.
If they are claiming probable cause to extract the info without a warrant based on the fact that there is information on the phone that would prove criminal activity on the part of the owner, I would think that wouldn’t pass Constitutional muster.
The real question is what happens after you get arrested for something else. Let’s say that the traffic stop results in a DUI arrest. Do the police then have a right to scan your phone? Again I would think not, but these are questions that need to be answered. These aren’t questions of what the MSP have done, they are questions of what they think they can do as a matter of policy. Those are the questions ACLU should be asking
</IANAL>
The Detroit Free Press ran a cartoon Sunday, showing a guy being pulled over and police demanding his phone. He suggested they should change the wording on the cop car from State Police to Police State.
