DETROIT -- The Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is questioning the Michigan State Police's use of cellphone "extraction" devices.
The ACLU said MSP has used the devices to access information from cellphones that officers ask drivers they have pulled over to give them.
"It can contain information that many people consider to be private, to be beyond the reach of law enforcement and other government actors," said Mark Fancher, an ACLU attorney.
"The State Police will provide information in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act ... there may be a processing fee to search for, retrieve, examine and separate exempt material ... ," MSP said in a statement.
Fancher said MSP priced that information, pertaining to five devices, at about $500,000.
"This should be something that they are handing over freely, and that they should be more than happy to share with the public -- the routines and the guidelines that they follow," Fancher said.
So they pull you over for a traffic violation, illegally scan your phone and copy all your private information, then if you want to see what info they have on you and they charge you $500,000 for the priviledge. Sounds like East Germany to me.
2 comments:
Isn't that just amusing? I suppose a lot of folks don't use encryption, so the cops might get something of use - but how much cop-time does it take to sift through the data?
If I was gonna do something like this, I'd use a sieve algorithm to winnow out all but possibly relevant data. I'd toss encrypted stuff because it takes too many resources to crack into unless you already have a pretty good idea of what's in there.
This seems like a classic example of implementing technology without the brains to successfully deploy it.
this is going to be one of our major topics on the radio show this week... but the question more importantly is without a search warrant what gives an officer the right to search your cell phone?
Or are they comparing it to searching your wallet and your person?
and aren't you supposed to be under arrest for those type of searches?
Makes for an interesting debate.
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