Comment by 4k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4k | Hacker News Reader

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   Warrentless cellphone searches are reasonable if only it falls within a specific exception to Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. See Kentucky vs King.

I looked up Kentucky vs King on wiki. TL;DR warrantless searches conducted in police-created exigent circumstances [0] do not violate the Fourth Amendment so long as the police did not create the exigency by violating or threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment.

So, does that mean if police knocked on my door suspecting I might delete sensitive data on my phone before they get to it, are they still allowed to do warrantless search of my cell phone?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_...

EDIT: DO not start fucking downvoting just for the heck of it. May be I didn't understand it well, does that mean I can't ask a question here?

that would seem to be a similar argument to "if someone denies a police officer entry to their home, that means they're suspicious and therefore there is probable cause" which isn't valid

And yet we see plenty of videos on YouTube where a person is arrested for resisting arrest and nothing else...

I only read the opinion summary and the concurrence, but from the summary:

> And, at least as to remote wiping, law enforcement currently has some technologies of its own for combatting the loss of evidence.

And from the rest, once the officers have removed the phone from your person, there's no longer a danger of you wiping it. Of course, I don't want to suggest in the least way that officers will actually /follow/ this guideline, and that lower courts will uphold it, but there you go.

Also the officers can presumably stick it in a $19 RF-shielded pouch to avoid a remote wipe by a confederate of the arrestee.

Maybe we need a dead man's switch on our phones? If you haven't entered your passcode in the past x hours, it self-wipes?

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