Big Brother watching you is old news. We grew up on it, we frequently make jokes about the FBI agent in our phones and — if you permit me the honesty — I don’t really care if Biden + Friends happen to see my search history, God bless and God speed to the Commander in Chief if he clicks the link to the Chris Chan documentary in my recent history. The scarier snooper, the one they neglected to warn us against when we did our 1984 readings, is the omnipresent meat-smoking aficionado who goes by Mark Zuckerberg. We’ve already covered the danger that the Facebook x Police collab can pose to privacy. While that case pertained to abortion, you should still be wary of the risk that your private conversations could be made public. End-to-end encryption isn’t the end-all answer.
[S]omething we spend a great deal of time at Upturn researching, which is that more than 2,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States have these tools that are called mobile device forensic tools. And these tools are cellphone extraction tools that are a powerful technology that allow police to extract a full copy of data from your cellphone – so imagine all of your emails, all of your texts, all your photos, all of your locations, app data and more – which can then be searched by law enforcement. So I’d say to someone who’s worried that law enforcement won’t be able to get access just because Facebook says we’re going to deploy end-to-end encrypted messaging across our platform, is that that does not shut the door on law enforcement access, period. The unfortunate reality is that so many of us today have retained so much private information on our phone, and that can still be the subject of a search warrant by law enforcement.
That’s a cause for concern, even if you’re not planning to get an abortion or are having Facebook conversations about overthrowing the DHS because Orange Man got caught with papers he didn’t have clearance for. It is important to be tech savvy — just because you think a conversation is protected or gone doesn’t mean it is. Take Melvin, for instance.
Third-party doctrine and surveillance make for great Supreme Court fodder — I care more about a sheriff getting a full data copy of my phone than I do about them triangulating my location based off of cellphone towers, at least.
When Law Enforcement Wants Your Social Media Content, Do Data Privacy Laws Hold Up? [NPR]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
