Calif. Supreme Court approves warrantless data seizures by police

By Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Jan. 04, 2011

If you're arrested in California, data stored on your mobile phone, tablet or other portable computing devices could be seized by police without so much as a search warrant.

That's thanks to a recent decision by the state's highest court, which declared on Monday that any and all expectations of privacy are lost once a defendant is in state custody.

By a vote of 5-2, the court said police may "rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer," according to the dissenting opinion of Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar.

Werdegar was joined by Justice Carlos Moreno in opposing the decision.

"The majority thus sanctions a highly intrusive and unjustified type of search, one meeting neither the warrant requirement nor the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution," Werdegar continued. "As a commentator has noted, '[i]f courts adopted this rule, it would subject anyone who is the subject of a custodial arrest, even for a traffic violation, to a preapproved foray into a virtual warehouse of their most intimate communications and photographs without probable cause.'"

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