Michigan Supreme Court: Unrestricted phone searches violate Fourth Amendment

Several years ago I had the opportunity to observe when a detective came to a magistrate's office to petition for a search warrant. The warrant sought to search the contents of a person's phone, essentially without any limitations. The alleged crime was assault and battery on a family member. When asked "What is your probable cause that the phone is likely to contain evidence of the commission of this crime?" the detective had basically nothing to say (having put nothing to that effect in the affidavit for the search warrant) other than some vague (cooked up on the spot?) statements about the "mobile nature of our modern society and the fact that cell phones are everywhere and everyone has one." The magistrate denied the warrant, but it's a sad testament to the propensity of law enforcement to cut corners that that search warrant affidavit was far from the last one I saw that targeted the cell phone of an accused and claimed that it was necessary to search the entire contents of the phone.

You're making the argument that the system is broken with an example of the system working? I guess the semantic trick is that you don't reveal that the system actually stopped him until the very end of the comment, and in much less space. About 2/3 of the comment is describing the warrent, only the last 1/3 reveals that it's a nothing burger because it was denied.

Obviously law enforcement are going to cut corners. They're human beings, who are mostly interested in stopping crime. That's exactly why we force them to get warrents, to have a dispassionate believer in "the Law" as an ideal concept check in with their investigation.

They should be following the law. We want "defense in depth" in everything and not have a single point of failure.

> They're human beings

So are judges and they will make mistakes. Remember that a judge signed the warrant in Kansas. Previously, on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240755