John Frank Weaver reports:
…. One court making decisions that will affect autonomous cars is the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which is currently considering its decision in Commonwealth v. Dorelas, a case examining how specific a warrant must be before police can search a smartphone. (Full disclosure: I helped the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts draft its amicus brief.) There are two major schools of thought about warrants for searching cellphones. The first considers a smartphone a “container” and holds that a warrant essentially needs only to describe the phone and the probable cause. The second recognizes that smartphones are computers with tens of thousands of files; to satisfy the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, a warrant must describe the phone and files sought, as well as explain the probable cause.
Read more on Slate.