Technically Legal

Recently Mac developer and Somerville native Daniel Jalkut had his iPhone stolen from a locker room. Daniel used MobileMe, an Apple service, to locate his phone in order to get it back. Then, he called an MIT police officer to report the crime, and presumably the street address of the alleged thieves.

This got me thinking, it’s perfectly legal for Daniel to hand all this information over to the police. But what if he were to hand over the password to his MobileMe Account, so the police could track the phone in real time, right down to the house where the thieves were keeping it? Would the police be able to do that? What if the police, with Daniel right next to them, asked him to open up MobileMe and find the phone.

Oddly, under current Supreme Court law, I think this would be an illegal search under the Fourth Amendment.

The case is United States v. Karo. Briefly, the case involved a defendant ordering 50 gallons of ether, used to extract cocaine from clothing in which it was smuggled. The DEA caught wind of this of put a tracking device in the ether barrel. They then used the tracking device to pinpoint the exact house where the ether was being kept. Using that information, they obtained a warrant, searched the house, and bused the drug dealers.

The problem the Supreme Court had with this (in a starkly divided opinion), was that the DEA was using this electronic device to do a search that they never would have been able to do without a warrant. They could have easily followed the car from where they picked up the ether to the house, but the police would have risked detection. Instead, they used this device to essentially search the house from the outside.

You run into a similar problem with the iPhone. Daniel could print out the information from MobileMe, give it to the police with a statement about how he got it, and they could get a warrant from that, and that would probably be A-OK (assuming you could explain this all to the judge who was reviewing the motion to suppress). However, as soon as the police take over the MobileMe account, or even direct Daniel to check it, you run the risk of violating the thieves’ right to be free of unreasonable searches or seizures.

You don’t run in to this problem with LoJack or OnStar, because those cars are on the road, and you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location of a car if it’s on the street. But here, without a search warrant the police wouldn’t be able to tell if the iPhone was in your house, and there is a strong argument that the police using the Find My Phone feature would violate the Constitution.

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