Yet another reason to password-protect your smartphone

Image via CrunchBase

Putting a password on your phone is good for keeping a paranoid significant other from snooping. It’s also a good idea in case you’re arrested. From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Police in Daly City, California seized a suspect’s iPhone during his arrest. Hours later, investigators bypassed the password and searched through the data on the device without a search warrant. After the officers realized that the information was too extensive to write down, they finally obtained a warrant to search the phone.

EFF has urged the court to suppress evidence gathered by police from the suspect’s phone during the warrantless search, including contacts, called phone numbers, emails, text messages, Internet search history, and photos. EFF has also asked the judge to quash the warrant that was eventually issued in part based on the information illegally accessed on the phone.

via EFF Asks Court to Suppress Evidence Illegally Gathered From Password-Protected Phone | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The court documents [PDF] offer a bit more detail. Christian Taylor is a founder of Hype UniverCity, a company with an annoying name and a confusing mission — something about harnessing college-bound students’ purchasing power. Whatever it is that Hype does, it requires many BlackBerrys.

Taylor went to a Sprint store to buy 30 BlackBerrys for his company, but he didn’t have proper documentation for his business with him. He said he would return the next day with his company’s tax id and articles of incorporation. For some reason, this made the clerk suspicious.

When Taylor returned the next day, the clerk called the police…

According to the complaint that EFF has filed on Taylor’s behalf, the police arrested Taylor and seized his iPhone:

Mr. Taylor’s iPhone was password protected. Rather than placing the phone in inventory, as is appropriate when an item is seized incident to arrest, Officer Bocci bypassed the password on the phone and searched its contents.

Apparently, Taylor didn’t have a very cryptic password?

Detective Bocci told Mr. Taylor that he knew how to access iPhone information because he used to own one. The officers then questioned Mr. Taylor about information they found during the search of the iPhone, including questions about why his girlfriend needed a nice new outfit to wear on Friday….

The information officers found stored on the iPhone, or by accessing Mr. Taylor’s email accounts via his iPhone includes, but is not limited to, the number 510-378-**** displayed on the phone, the number Defendant provided on the booking sheet, a large amount of information, including phone book contacts, called phone numbers, emails, text messages, Internet search history, and photos.

The EFF has filed a motion to have the evidence found during this warrantless search suppressed. (They don’t include information about what incriminating evidence was found or why buying 30 BlackBerrys is suspicious.)

Still: Just because a police officer knows how to operate an iPhone doesn’t mean that the Fourth Amendment ceases to exist.

It also illustrates why it’s important to put a fairly complex password on your smartphone. “1-2-3-4″ — or whatever easy combination Taylor likely chose — isn’t going to cut it.