Tag Archives: smartphone

A lawsuit headed by the ACLU of Northern California is challenging the right of police to confiscate the cell phones of people they arrest and search through them without first obtaining a warrant. The case began when activist Bob Offer-Westort was arrested while protesting an anti-camping law in San Francisco. While he was handcuffed, the arresting officer scrolled through his phone and read his text messages aloud, over Offer-Westort’s objections. That was a violation of his privacy rights and his …

  To read a companion article on Huffington Post, see The Legal Battle Over Cell Phone Location Privacy Did you know the government can be tracking you as you listen to this podcast? In today’s Lawyers.com Radio broadcast, host Matt Plessner interviews Editor in Chief Larry Bodine about an alarming trend going through the courts right now, where the police are making requests to cell phone companies to tell them the location of their customers. “They’re not asking to listen …

In a frightening new decision, a federal appeals court says that you have no expectation of privacy when the police want to track your location using your cell phone. U.S. v. Skinner, Case No. 09-6497. The court said that the police don’t need to bother getting a warrant if they want to track you by using the GPS signal in your cell phone to track you. This means that sheriffs can freely track Latinos who could be undocumented, the police …

Despite claims by Illinois police that an anti-eavesdropping law makes it illegal to record them in public, residents of the state can, in fact, make video and audio recordings of the cops, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled. The ruling came at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had plans to record Chicago-area police, and which sought a court ruling that doing so would be OK despite an Illinois law that prohibits taping a …

The government could be tracking your every move, and there’s little you can do to stop it – or even to find out who is watching – according to a recent investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU reviewed 200 law enforcement agencies across the U.S., and found that nearly all have tracked down individuals’ private cell phone records, many times without a warrant or court order. Only 10 police departments surveyed said they had never tracked cell …