More cell phone legal issues

Police arrested a man in Daly City, Calif. when he tried to buy 30 cell phones for his business. The salesman from Sprint alerted the police when he became suspicious. From cnetnews.com:

[The suspect] was arrested on charges of felony identity fraud, his car was impounded, and his iPhone was confiscated and searched by police without a warrant.

Although U.S. citizens are innocent until proven guilty, it would appear that the man buying cell phones was up to no good. Police don’t generally go to all that work for nothing. But his iPhone was searched without a warrant, which the Obama administration maintains is Constitutional.

“There are very, very few cases involving smartphones,” Chris Feasel, deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The law has not necessarily caught up to the technology.”

I totally agree – the law needs to catch up with cell phones. While law enforcement should be able to search laptops and cell phones if there is probable cause, they should also be held in check by their Constitutional boundaries provided by the Fourth Amendment protections.

I have seen cases where terrorist groups purchase cell phones in similar manners, so perhaps this heads-up Sprint employee and the Daly City P.D. dealt the bad guys a blow. But if that is the case – or if he was just an ordinary citizen breaking the law – couldn’t the police easily obtain a search warrant?

Unless it turns out that he is in fact a foreign national committing acts of war against the U.S., I don’t think that’s asking too much.