Let's see.... Not true, not true, not true, not true, and not true. Add two more to that. It was the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, it was March 1, the ruling doesn't allow them to take and open anything - only the cell phone, and they cannot upload your info into their scanning devices without a warrant. A simple traffic stop is not enough of a reason, and probable cause is still needed. Here's the
actual PDF of the actual ruling, courtesy of the American Bar Association Journal.
The ruling allows the police to search the phone in order to obtain that particular phone's telephone number, nothing more. It's specifically for the purposes of obtaining the number in order to then, at a later time, use a warrant to subpoena that phone number's call history from the phone carrier. It doesn't allow them to search anything else in the phone, including any files, pictures or even other phone numbers.
The ruling found that the invasion of privacy was so slight that the police's actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches.
The case gave the court an occasion to examine just how far police can go when it comes to searching electronic gadgets, but the important question of just how far police can go in searching a phone's
contents was left for another day.
"Lurking behind this issue is the question whether and when a laptop or desktop computer, tablet, or other type of computer (whether called a 'computer' or not) can be searched without a warrant," Judge Richard Posner wrote for the three-judge panel.
He raised the example of the iCam, which allows someone to use a phone to connect to a home-computer web camera, enabling someone to search a house interior remotely.
"At the touch of a button, a cell phone search becomes a house search," he wrote.
Posner compared the cell phone to a diary. Just as police are entitled to open a pocket diary to copy an owner's address, they should be able to turn on a cell phone to learn its number. But just as they're forbidden from examining love letters tucked between the pages of an address book, so are they forbidden from exploring letters in the files of a phone.
