FUD of the day award

Not for the first time, Declan McCullagh takes the prize with this paragraph from his report Police push for warrantless searches of cell phones:

Privacy advocates say that long-standing legal rules allowing police to search suspects during an arrest--including looking through their wallets and pockets - should not apply to smartphones because the amount of material they store is so much greater and the risks of intrusive searches are so much higher. A 32GB iPhone 3GS, for instance, can hold approximately 220,000 copies of the unabridged text of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Would that be compressed or uncompressed text, pray tell?

The right of police to search your person and possessions incidental to arrest is well established - no warrant is required. That you can theoretically cram a whole lot of text data onto an iPhone is immaterial. Advances in binary explosives mean you could pack an extraordinarily powerful bomb inside your man purse, a bomb much more powerful than what you could previously pack into the same accessory if you were limited to dear old TNT. Either way, if Officer Friendly has cause to put you in cuffs, he has cause to look at what you have in the bag, and either way if what he finds is incriminating - too bad for you.

NEXT!

Posted on 22 February 2010 @ 23:54