By Damon Poeter
PC Magazine.com
SAN FRANCISCO — A July search of a San Francisco man’s home by Apple security accompanied by plainclothes police has raised questions about how the visit was conducted.
The San Francisco Police Department is conducting an internal probe into how a search was conducted by SFPD officers and Apple security employees for a missing iPhone prototype believed to be Apple’s next-generation iPhone 5, an SFPD spokesman said Wednesday.
SFPD spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield said that the police department was looking into the manner in which four plainclothes officers assisted two Apple security officials in the search of a San Francisco man’s home in July, according to CNET. Though the missing handset has not been identified by SFPD or Apple as an unreleased iPhone 5 prototype, it is widely believed that an iPhone 5 test device that reportedly went missing at a San Francisco bar in July was the target of the search.
The search of 22-year-old Sergio Calderón’s home and effects raised questions when Calderón told SF Weekly that six people who showed up at his door in July represented themselves as being SFPD officers, though it later turned out that two of the six were in fact Apple employees. Though SFPD initially said it had no record of the visit to Calderón’s home, Dangerfield said later that four SFPD officers accompanied two members Apple’s private security force, but waited outside while the Apple employees conducted the search.
There had initially been questions as to whether the Apple employees had overstepped legal boundaries by impersonating police officers, though those concerns seemed to have been dispelled by SFPD’s statement that its officers had been present at the visit.
But Calderón, who lives with his extended, also told SF Weekly that the Apple employees had threatened to expose the immigration status of his relatives if he didn’t agree to the search of his home.
San Francisco criminal attorney Jai Gohel told PCMag that if a private citizen threatened somebody in that way to get them to agree to a search, it could be considered extortion, while officers of the law doing so could be violating the searched party’s Constitutional rights.
CNET cited a source “close to the investigation” who said it had been the SFPD officers who asked Calderón if they could search his house and that he agreed when they told him that if he declined they would obtain a search warrant to do so.
Calderón has said he has no knowledge of where the missing phone is, but he did tell SF Weekly that he was at Cava 22, the Mission District tequila bar where the handset reportedly went missing, on the night it disappeared.
The whole affair is strikingly similar to a predicament Apple found itself in last year with a prototype of the then-unreleased iPhone 4. That test device was lost in a bar in Redwood City, Calif. and subsequently wound up in the hands of tech blog Gizmodo, which paid $5,000 for the device. Two men have been charged with misappropriation of lost property and possession of stolen property, but Gizmodo escaped any legal action.
Copyright 2011 Ziff Davis Media Inc.