Anything on Your Phone May Be Used Against You in a Court of Law

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is pretty clear: 

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The right to be secure in one's person, houses, papers and effects has been effectively eviscerated in the United States.  Do you think all that information on your smart phone is secure?  Think again.  From Ars Technica:

The courts have traditionally allowed the police to inspect any items a suspect is carrying when they arrest him or her. But in the past, the information the police could obtain in this fashion was fairly limited. The advent of the smartphone has changed all that.

A new document uncovered by the ACLU provides insight into just how aggressive law enforcement agencies have become about obtaining the contents of seized cell phones. Last fall, writes the ACLU's Chris Soghoian, "officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized an iPhone from the bedroom of a suspect in a drug investigation."

A document filed in court shows that police extracted a wealth of personal information from the device, including call records, contacts, stored text messages, photos, videos, and passwords. They also obtained "659 geolocation points, including 227 cell towers and 403 Wi-Fi networks with which the cell phone had previously connected"—a detailed record of where the device had been in previous weeks. Soghoian says law enforcement agencies can buy portable devices that extract this kind of information from smartphones in a matter of minutes.

As in the Republican and Democratic parties, the quasi-fascist mentality that grips the leadership in the nation's law enforcement agencies is a grave threat to the rights and liberties of the people of the United States.  But it appears few people give a damn.