About 12 million Americans are arrested by police every year, on suspicion of committing heinous crimes, and sometimes when they’re entirely innocent. Sometimes police officers start confrontations and then arrest citizens in the name of law enforcement.
Most of us own smartphones now, and inevitably, those portable personal data-centers have become prizes for arresting officers. In the name of peace and safety, police want the right to search our cell phones and sweep up all our personal data without our consent and, just as importantly, without a warrant from a judge.
The Supreme Court is taking up the question. Take a look at who wants to give police that power.
Once seized, the phone could be disabled by removing the battery and placing it in a device to shield it from outside transmissions. That would secure the phone and any crime-revealing content for the hour or two it would take to justify to a judge that the cellphone search was not an unreasonable invasion of the phone owner’s privacy.
The Obama administration and the California Attorney General’s Office are urging the court to endorse a bright-line rule that would allow police to search the full content of any cellphone, tablet, or laptop computer being carried by anyone arrested by authorities for any reason. (emphasis added)
The Christian Science Monitor’s story doesn’t provide the telling detail, so I will: The most leftwing administration and the most leftwing state government want broad police powers to scoop up all the data on your phone, tablet or computer if police pick you up for any reason. Even if you end up not being charged with any crime at all.
The Democrat-led governments claim that they want this power to fight terrorism and violent crime, but in the vast majority of cases, neither are relevant. We have seen several cases recently, such as the jogger in Austin, in which police may have caused confrontation leading to arrest for resisting arrest. We have seen police make mistakes and no-knock raid the wrong house, destroy property, kill pets and imprison the wrong people. The government then wants the power to search the arrested person’s cell phone if they feel like it, without any intervention or braking from a judge. The Obama administration and the Democrat government in California both want to make that search power as expansive as possible.
Progressives make grand claims to be for universal individual freedom. But where they have the most power, they want to give police the power to scoop up your personal data for any reason, however thin, and before you have even been charged with a crime serious enough to warrant such an invasion of your privacy.
It takes little effort to imagine how such a broad power can be used politically. Police routinely arrest protesters who protest everything from war to abortion to local zoning. Police officers in a corrupt jurisdiction could be sent out to start confrontations with protesters, arrest them, and then scour their phones to find all their associates, supporters, friends and family members and use that information against the protester — who hasn’t committed any crime — and against any or all of that person’s contacts.
What if the arrested protester has contacts within the police department who have information about corruption within the department? Can officers in a jurisdiction such as — just to throw out an example we’re all familiar with around the Tatler — Hidalgo County, Texas be trusted with such sweeping power?
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