So I read this story yesterday which just pushed me over the edge into full scale paranoia. I now require instant password on my iphone, password when leaving the screen saver or when waking up. I haven’t had auto-login for a while, so that’s nothing new. I’m also looking into full-disk encryption (which seems to be a no-go for Macs for now), fully encrypting all my email (which is problematic since I use gmail) and am looking for other ways to protect myself.
The Smith ruling turned on the fact that “addressing information” of the sort obtained by a pen register had been conveyed to the phone company and stored in their records. It was emphatically not a finding that a person’s “addressing information”—the names and phone numbers of the other people someone contacts—was just per se unprotected. And in fact, Congress responded to Smith by establishing a statutory requirement that police obtain a court order (though subject to a lower evidentiary standard than full-blown Fourth Amendment warrants) before using a pen-register or a trap-and-trace device to get that “addressing information” from a telecom. So even if police had wanted to get Fierros-Alvarez’s call history from that less protected source, they’d at least be subject to some judicial process.
Um, no.
But in any case, let’s see anyone argue that my info doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy when its behind a password (and hopefully soon, 256-bit AES encryption).
Fascist assholes.