Here’s latest, from the Contra-Costa Times:

MARTINEZ — The California Highway Patrol officer accused of stealing nude photos from a DUI suspect’s phone told investigators that he and his fellow officers have been trading such images for years, in a practice that stretches from its Los Angeles office to his own Dublin station, according to court documents obtained by this newspaper Friday.

CHP Officer Sean Harrington, 35, of Martinez, also confessed to stealing explicit photos from the cellphone of a second Contra Costa County DUI suspect in August and forwarding those images to at least two CHP colleagues. The five-year CHP veteran called it a “game” among officers, according to an Oct. 14 search warrant affidavit.

Harrington told investigators he had done the same thing to female arrestees a “half dozen times in the last several years,” according to the court records, which included leering text messages between Harrington and his Dublin CHP colleague, Officer Robert Hazelwood.

Contra Costa County prosecutors are investigating and say the conduct of the officers — none of whom has been charged so far — could compromise any criminal cases in which they are witnesses.

It also makes you wonder about the intelligence of the officers hired nowadays as CHiPS. Didn’t they know that, if they could leer into the digital lives of suspects, somebody eventually also could uncover their digital leering?

This also is another reason to cheer the recent decision by Apple to automatically encrypt all the communications on its devices — and to reject the FBI’s objections about the action supposedly compromising national security. Wired wrote:

At issue is the improved iPhone encryption built into iOS 8. For the first time, all the important data on your phone—photos, messages, contacts, reminders, call history—are encrypted by default. Nobody but you can access the iPhone’s contents, unless your passcode is compromised, something you can make nearly impossible by changing your settings to replace your four-digit PIN with an alphanumeric password.

Rather than welcome this sea change, which makes consumers more secure, top law enforcement officials, including US Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI director James Comey, are leading a charge to maintain the insecure status quo. They warn that without the ability to crack the security on seized smartphones, police will be hamstrung in critical investigations. John Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department, predicts the iPhone will become “the phone of choice for the pedophile.”

But what if the perverts are in the government?

By Joseph Perkins

Is one of every 186 cell phone users a criminal suspect?

One might think so in the wake of the revelation this week, in a congressional report,  that law enforcement requested data last year from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and other carriers on the calls, text messages and, perhaps most ominously, location of more  than 1.3 million of the nation’s 234 million cellular customers.

The growing threat to privacy rights posed by increased police use of secret and, in many cases, warrantless cell phone surveillance underscores the importance of legislation, the California Location Privacy Act, that would require law enforcement to secure a search warrant before accessing location information from any electronic device.

The measure, SB 1434, was approved last week by the Assembly Committee on Public Safety, which followed its approval back in May on the Senate floor. Particularly noteworthy is that the bill, authored by Sen. Mark Leno, the San Francisco liberal, won the support of not only his fellow Democrats, but also Republicans.

That may be attributable in part to questions that remain after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this past January that law enforcement’s secret attachment of a GPS device on a vehicle constitutes a “search” and therefore requires a search warrant; but it left unsettled whether the same ruling applies to GPS location tracking by way of cell phone.

The U.S. Justice Department maintains that the high court’s ruling, United States v. Jones, does not apply to mobile devices “because there is no trespass or physical intrusion on a customer’s cell phone,” thus no need for law enforcement to obtain a warrant before asking wireless carriers to turn over customer data.

State action

Lawmakers in Sacramento see things differently. The majority believe that the constitutional protection against warrantless searches applies not only to cases of trespass or intrusion, but also to secret cell phone surveillance.

And they have codified that in the proposed California Location Privacy Act, which makes it clear to both “government entities” and wireless service providers that a probable cause warrant must be obtained before compromising a cell phone user’s privacy.

The measure would allow exceptions to be made in cases in which a cell phone user has requested emergency services or law enforcement reasonably believes there is immediate danger of death or serious injury to a person or persons.

The one major shortcoming of Leno’s otherwise laudable legislation is that imposes no requirement on cell phone carriers here in California to provide annual reports on the number of law enforcement requests the receive to spy on their cell phone customers.

CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group representing the wireless telecommunications industry, sent a letter to Leno this past April opposing such a requirement, arguing that it would “unduly burden wireless providers,” and that it was doubtful that compliance “would best serve wireless customers.”

Yet, the industry already keeps copious records on data requests for purposes of billing law enforcement for those requests. It could easily compile those records into an annual report to the state.

And as to what best serves wireless customers, reporting or not reporting annual law enforcement requests for cell phone records, most of us almost certainly would prefer transparency.

For while we understand that law enforcement needs certain latitude to apprehend criminals, including use of secret cell phone surveillance, safeguards must be in place to ensure that our privacy rights are not routinely trampled upon.