I think people who say they are too ordinary, law abiding, and boring for police to violate them, are more wishing that were true than stating a fact.
Will the police keep the phone as it keeps generating evidence? For how long? Can you refuse to provide your password or will the police IT department bypass it?
In Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novelSuper Sad True Love Story of a terrible future, everyone walks around with an “apparati,” a data-collection rating device on their chest. It’s like wearing an open cellphone. This court ruling takes us one step closer to this.
And it is very easy to be arrested. It just happened to a friend’s teenage son, the victim of two 30-year-old men following him around filming him and harassing him. The boy, wrongly accused of aggression, was strip-searched. He’s too young to have any secrets on his cell, but I thought he was too gentle a kid to be arrested in the first place. I was wrong.
He was vulnerable to lazily vicious cops. You think it cannot happen to you. Maybe it will.
