News

The Record: Cars have become computers on wheels — and police have easy access to their data 

December 18, 2023

Searches of vehicles are wrongly held to comparatively low legal standards, meaning there is no need for a warrant, John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, concurred. 

“If the information obtained using Berla appears in a criminal prosecution later on, there would be potential for that evidence to be excluded if law enforcement lacked the requisite reasonable suspicion or probable cause at the time that they exfiltrated the data,” Davisson said. “But there is no judge on the scene when law enforcement is stopping a vehicle so they could, as a practical matter, certainly get that data in the first instance.” 

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