A US court ruled that the police needed a warrant, even to just look at the phone screen.

A judge in Illinois, USA, ruled that unlocking the suspect’s phone, or even just viewing a screen saver by law enforcement officials, is against the law if the police have no warrant to inspect the phone.

The decision was made on the basis of a precedent from 2014 , in which the Supreme Court announced the need to obtain a warrant for the investigation of suspects' smartphones. In a new case, a judge from Illinois simply expanded the concept of “search” by including in it a screen saver view.
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In the case under review, Demontae Bell was accused of drug trafficking and possession of automatic weapons. The policeman, during the interrogation, Bell pulled out the confiscated phone of the suspect, and saw on the screen saver a photo of a Kalashnikov. The policeman decided to investigate the photo metadata to find out when and where it was taken. At the same time at the trial a police officer said that at first he just wanted to turn off the phone.

The judge ruled that the contents of the screen saver belong to the hidden parts of the phone as an object, which means it is beyond the scope of the “surface inspection”. Since it was necessary to turn on the phone screen to view the screen saver of the device, it was not “in sight”. This means that even if your phone is not locked, the police do not have the right to turn it on and examine its contents without having a warrant.

Exceptions are cases when a police officer is in danger, or there is a danger of destroying evidence. In this case, these exceptions were not the motive of the policeman who was inspecting the suspect’s phone. Consequently, his actions violated the fourth amendment to the US Constitution , which prohibits unreasonable searches and detentions, and also requires that any search warrants be issued only by the court if there are sufficient grounds.