http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26sat2.html

The Ohio Supreme Court has struck an important blow for privacy rights, ruling that the police need a warrant to search a cellphone. The court rightly recognized that cellphones today are a lot more than just telephones, that they hold a wealth of personal information and that the privacy interest in them is considerable. This was the first such ruling from a state supreme court. It is a model for other courts to follow.

Searches generally require warrants, but courts have carved out limited categories in which they are not needed. One of these is that police officers are allowed, when they arrest people, to search them and the area immediately surrounding them, as well as some kinds of containers in their possession.

When the police arrested Antwaun Smith on drug charges they seized his cellphone and searched it, examining his call records. The police did not have a warrant or the consent of Mr. Smith.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled this month, by a 4-to-3 vote, that the search violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Rather than seeing a cellphone as a simple closed container, the majority noted that modern cellphones — especially ones that permit Internet access — are “capable of storing a wealth of digitized information.”

This is information, the court said, for which people reasonably have a high expectation of privacy, and under established Fourth Amendment principles, police officers must get a search warrant before they can look through call logs or examine other data. The court wisely decided that it made no sense to try to distinguish among various kinds of cellphones based on what specific functions they have. All cellphones, the court said, fall under the search warrant requirement.

Few federal courts have considered the issue of cellphone searches, and they have disagreed about whether a warrant should be required. The Ohio ruling eloquently makes the case for why the very personal information that new forms of technology aggregate must be accorded a significant degree of privacy.

Good to hear. A little close however.

http://online.wsj.com/…

Japanese technology giants Hitachi Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. said Tuesday that, like Sony Corp., their optical disk drive operations in the U.S. received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice in a widening investigation into potential antitrust violations.

According to a person familiar with the inquiry, the Justice Department started a criminal antitrust probe into the market for optical disk drives in recent months, investigating disk-drive makers for possible price-fixing, bid-rigging and allocation of markets. Optical disk drives are used in everyday consumer products like DVD and Blu-ray disk players, as well as in personal computers.

The investigation comes on the heels of a successful Justice Department investigation into price-fixing in the market for liquid crystal displays used in computers, cell phones and televisions.

That probe snared five companies that paid more than $600 million in combined criminal fines in 2008 and 2009.

That’s $600m+ that customers and investors will get to eat in this indirect taxation. The companies here, even if they were colluding to keep prices up, did nothing wrong. The drives are theirs. They can charge whatever the hell they like for them. If you don’t think it’s a good trade… don’t make it. The only way they are able to keep such a cartel going for an extended period of time is due to government intervention in the first place in the form of intellectual property monopoly privileges and all the perks provided to corporations which limit competition.

And how is a cartel much different from a worker’s union? They join together to increase bargaining power with employers in order to raise the collective compensation for their product… labor. This alleged cartel is made up of multiple businesses joined together to increase their bargaining power with the consumer in order to raise the collective compensation for their product… a optical drive.

In a freer market just about any cartel of size would quickly fall apart due to the overwhelming incentives offered to those who would lower prices. In all the well known supposed anti-trust situations throughout US history the market broke the near monopolies and cartels long before the government got involved. In fact often it was the trusts that supported the regulations ultimately because it reduced competition and created government backed cartels. Railroads, oil, electricity, telephone, banking… all made cartels by the government.

http://www.google.com/…

In its search for fugitives, the FBI has begun using facial-recognition technology on millions of motorists, comparing driver’s license photos with pictures of convicts in a high-tech analysis of chin widths and nose sizes.

The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong.

“Everybody’s participating, essentially, in a virtual lineup by getting a driver’s license,” said Christopher Calabrese, an attorney who focuses on privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Facial-recognition software is not entirely new, but the North Carolina project is the first major step for the FBI as it considers expanding use of the technology to find fugitives nationwide.

And what happens to those aggressors when they come waste your time and possibly arrest an innocent person who happened to look like a known criminal? Absolutely nothing.

Additionally… no one has a right to privacy but the government has no legitimate authority to change the terms in which the information is utilized.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

The Internet has taken a lot of the paperwork out of banking, but there is no avoiding paper when someone gives you a check. Now one bank wants to let customers deposit checks immediately – through their phones.

USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone’s camera.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.

Customers will not have to mail the check to the bank later; the deposit will be handled entirely electronically, and the bank suggests voiding the check and filing or discarding it. But to reduce the potential for fraud, only customers who are eligible for credit and have some type of insurance through USAA will be permitted to use the deposit feature. Mr. Peacock said that about 60 percent of the bank’s customers qualify.

USAA may seem like an unlikely innovator in mobile banking. It ranks in size just below the top 20 banks in the United States, and serves mostly military personnel, though many of its products are available to anyone.

But with just one branch, in San Antonio, and customers deployed all over the world, the company has been aggressively developing an anytime, anywhere banking strategy. Three years ago, it introduced the option of depositing a check from home using a scanner. That laid the groundwork for the phone deposit feature, which USAA plans to offer on other phones this year.

I’ve used USAA all my life and have never had a problem with them. I’m happy to see they are front runners in this regard. Goes to show how those closer to the market are more flexible and end up serving their customers better.