스마트폰에 대한 긴급압수⋅수색의 효력 범위에 관한 고찰

Abstract

The importance of forensic evidence derived from digital equipment such as smartphones, tablet PCs and smartwatches has been growing day by day in the recent investigative environment. In particular, smartphones are always carried around in almost every daily process, so there may be conclusive evidence to prove any criminal charges, such as messages, location information, Internet search data, photos and videos, voice materials, various memos, phone numbers, phone calls, and payment details. In addition, mobile devices, such as smartphones, are often confiscated under the warrant’s exception rules, such as search and seizure at the scene of arrest and search for 24 hours after emergency arrest, due to their characteristics that they are always carried and easily transported to the human body. Therefore, it may be questionable whether the emergency seizure will take effect even on electronic information stored in the smartphone, if it is urgently confiscated under the warrant’s exception rules without receiving a prior warrant. In my opinion, the above emergency seizure should be considered effective for the information that investigators can visually verify without any special technical measures during the natural use of the smartphone itself, which was urgently confiscated without a prior warrant. Therefore, in this case, only a post-warrant for the smartphone itself will be required. However, once the smartphone is urgently seized and it is sent back to the Digital Forensics Center to restore the information files, it is considerable to obtain additional warrant for the information file that has been e xtracted throu gh d igital f orensics, because i t is n ot t he d ata that c an be verified from the natural use of the smartphone itself.