Doesn't much matter, all mobile devices worth using are constantly sending their data up to "the cloud", which, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act's provisions for National Security Letters (NSLs), the federal government can access at any time, in real-time, without a warrant or even post-hoc judicial review.<p>The time has come to leave America. No state law can change this. The fourth has been dead for TEN YEARS next month, it is nothing short of naïve now to believe that it will get any better.<p>There are lots of nice places to live in the first world where the government hasn't gone totally insane. Move there.
A state bill should be totally unnecessary. This is a constitutional right. If we accept this bill as the norm then its no longer a "right" and just a permission by the govt that can be rescinded at anytime.
Governor Jerry Brown<p>c/o State Capitol, Suite 1173<p>Sacramento, CA 95814<p>Phone: (916) 445-2841<p>Fax: (916) 558-3160<p><a href="http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php" rel="nofollow">http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php</a>
It will be interesting to see if this ends up being as abused as other warrant searches are. What is the probable cause of searching a cell phone? Does the guy have to have kiddie porn as his lock screen or is it enough to think he might have a drug dealer's home address in the phone book?
People's phones are almost their second homes, and in a way I am glad that the law is catching up with technology, but they need to be prepared for a whole nother set of issues that come with it
We desperately need someone to configure Android with LUKS/dm-crypt, which theoretically shouldn't be such a huge leap since Android is based on Linux (I know nothing about Android-specific kernel divergences, but would be interested to know if device-mapper is badly broken in Android kernels).<p>Another interesting project would be a service that sits on your phone and automatically encrypts all of the automatically synced data, so Google only received encrypted data and your phone transparently decrypted it upon demand. This one would probably require much deeper work than making device-mapper run on Android Linux kernels.<p>I am grateful to Google for making an open, decent phone system so that this kind of stuff is made possible. Think about the options we'd have if iOS was the only smartphone on the market.<p>People need to accept that without strong encryption, any and all of their digital storage is open to adversarial or even accidental perusal, and that they should have no realistic expectation of privacy without correct application of cryptographic techniques. This is true across every form of digital storage: mobile, desktop, laptop, cloud, USB stick, etc. Encrypt or suffer.