next on kqed "newsroom": should police be able to examen the contents of cell phones without a warrant? a look at the changing face of san francisco with mayor ed lee. plus, comedian brian copeland brings back his hit one-man show "not a genuine black man." >> i don't talk ghetto. when i hear the word "ax" i think of it as a noun. [ laughter ] good evening and welcome to

kqed "newsroom." i'm thuy vu. we begin tonight with something most of us would feel lost without -- our cell phones. we use them not only to keep in touch with family and friends but also for banking, storing photos, surfing the web, even checking our health records. they contain intimate details of our lives. next week, the u.s. supreme court considers this question -- after arresting someone, can police search that person's cell phone without a warrant? scott shafer leads our discussion. >> searching cell phones can help police solve crimes, but privacy advocates say doing it without a warrant violates the fourth amendment which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. joining me to explore the debate are professor rory it wille with uc hastings college of law and michelle quinn, "san jose mercury news" columnist in. well, folks, this is actually two cases before the supreme court next week, one is a california case. the san diego police pulled over a guy, young man who was driving, he had a suspended

license, he had expired tags. rory little, why did they have a need to look at his phone and what did they find? >> well, it's almost standard procedure for police to look at a phone if they can. they arrested him. there's a rule that says normally when you arrest somebody you can look at whatever they're carrying and it turned out this guy who was stopped for a traffic violation was connected by video on his phone to a prior drive-by gang shooting. and so they sort of little by little got evidence from his phone to tie them to the shooting and that's what he was ultimately prosecuted for. >> so that evidence was critical to his conviction and he's serve 15g years to life. >> 15 years with a gang enhancement proved by video where there was evidence that he was a member of one gang and shouting encouragement to other gang members. >> so if this gentleman had an address book on his seat the police could have searched that, no problem. they searched the phone. why is that different, michelle? >> well, i'm going to hold up my

phone because we all have phones here. this is, according to civil libertarians, the equivalent of having your entire life's data. it's bigger than just having one address book or piece of paper or a map on the front of your seat. this is like having access to all your file, videos, it's -- >> banks, health records. >> everything. and so being able to search your phone is being able to search everything -- where you've been, what you've searched on your phone, your location. and so this -- what the argument is, and this is what the supreme court is going to hear on tuesday, is the civil libertarians say this is -- this needs special protection. you can look for everything in a person's car when you arrest them or on their person there's something special about this. >> so searching the phone is like going into someone's house and looking through their files and everything else. >> so the analogies break down. the government says this is no different than your wallet.

and if they arrest you they can look through your wallet. and the defense says no, this is your entire house. this is more than your house, bank records and everything. there's also a first amendment aspect to this. the defense says this is profoundly expressive because people make videos, people take selfies. so it's a -- it's really intrusive. >> now the other case, the one on the east coast, the guy had a flip phone, not a smart phone, a dumb phone. is there a difference? night supreme court find -- what's the difference in terms of civil libertiestor law? >> well, i don't know about the law but the difference between a flip phone in 2007 and iphone today or even 2009 is vast. just the storage capability. the amount of video, the amount of documents. all your e-mail that you can access. and the first district -- the first court of appeals agreed with the defendant and said, you

know, they can't search. >> they can't do the search. >> so i think one thing that i think the court will be thinking about, and i'd like to know what you think, is what is reasonable for a police officer in this situation? do they need to know, well, look, that cell phone has this much storage. >> yeah, where's the line. >> i can't look at this one but i can look at that one. >> here's the interesting point. flip phone looks old-fashioned and antiquated today because we have iphones. five years from now people will watch that tape and say "look at that old-fashioned phone. we now have google glasses or google contact lenses" and that carries everything. so the technology -- the court has to be worried about not just today but what is going to be true five years from now. that's the clash today. old rules that you can search everything versus old rules that say you can't search somebody's house. >> and the police say, look, if we didn't search -- if we hadn't searched that guys phone right away, the pass code would have kicked in, it would haven't -- it would have locked, there there might have been an app on the phone that with one phone call could have deleted everything, we would have lost

the evidence forever. what's the response to that? >> that's a great point. this is something that the government feels strongly about because i think the defense says just get a warrant then you can search all you want. >> hold on to it. >> you have forensics, you can take it to an apple store and the government says you know we don't have time. we have to get to that phone and grab it and one of the rationales for being able to grab things when you arrest a person is to stop the destruction of evidence. that's one of the main ones. and they say well, we have to have it. and the response is from people who file briefs from the defense lawyers is it's actually -- there are things you can do. you can drop it into a -- what's the name of that bag? you can drop it into a bag with tinfoil on. >> it but technology is always changing. it's hard to future proof any kind of a decision. so where do you draw the line in terms of what's a reasonable expectation for privacy? >> well, that's a really good question and who should draw that line? the interesting something when

california first said you can search a cell phone the legislature immediately passed a law saying you've got to have a warrant to search an electronic device. >> which the governor vetoed. >> well, the governor vetoed it a week after the supreme court declined review in that case. so there you have -- and why did they decline review? they thought the legislature was going to take care of it. so who decides what's reasonable ands where the privacy line? i think you're going to see the court trying to move slowly here and they're going to divide. i think you'll see more than two opinions, certainly more than one. and they'll say, you know, we don't know what the rules should be in every case. we'll draw nuanced rules for these cases. we're not going to worry about fair day bags because no one had one here. we won't worry about the wiping technology because there's no evidence anybody used the wiping technology here. >> but they could have. >> and the interesting something no one has any case to support them. so the defense doesn't have any case where the government has gone through somebody's cell phone and exposed horrible private details. meanwhile, the government doesn't have any case where

wiping actually happened right after they arrested somebody. so it's all based on sort of our fear of the future. >> what is silicon valley thinking? i don't know how aware they are of this case but technology is at the heart of this question. >> well, silicon valuely is in its own fight about the kill switch so that your phone is stolen and can you just -- >> turn it into a brick. >> unless it's stolen by the police when they arrest you. >> right. so you probably saw or heard that there was a bill by the same senator, the state senator that died this week, which would have required all phones in california to be made with a kill switch. >> the court, of course, rory, has taken up technology issues before. based on what they've done, how are they going to look at this, do you think? >> you may remember a couple years ago they had a gps case. somebody put a tracking device on a car. the court divided into four different groups.

these are only nine justices, four different groups, even the people that agreed on the result could not agree on the rationale and technology sort of scares them. there are justices on that court who probably do not know how a smart phone works and other justices probably use their smart phone all the time. so justice scalia, interestingly enough, is siding with liberals on the search issues these days. justice breyer from san francisco tends to now side with the government. so the politics have flipped a little bit. so this case, i predict, will be slow and divided. >> and we should expect a ruling as always by the end of june? >> i'm expecting june 25. >> that's your prediction. and if they rule in favor of the defendant it goes back down to the trial court again? the government decides whether to retry him? >> yes, if they -- yes. almost no matter who they rule for it's going to go back down for further analysis. >> rory little, michelle quinn, interesting. i'm sure we'll be talking more about this in the future. thanks.

>> thanks. san francisco mayor ed lee has his work cut out for him despite the city's economic recovery. this week, the high tech boom in san francisco kept rolling along as the lease was signed for a new building. but with the boom comes growing pains. many long-time and middle-income residents are feeling squeezed out, blaming the tech explosion for skyrocketing housing costs and escalating culture wars. in his recent state of the city address, mayor lee acknowledged the problem. >> the rising cost of living, the financial squeeze on our city's working families and middle-class, these are the fundamental challenges of our time. >> in addition, city college of san francisco is struggling to keep its accreditation to serve tens of thousands of students. and the recent corruption scandal involving state senator leland yee has prompted questions about political ethics. here now to discuss this issue and more is mayor ed lee

himself. welcome to the program. >> thank you, it's great to be here. >> a dramatic shift. the warriors will build their san francisco in san francisco's mission bay, dropping their plans for peers 30 and 32. you said at one ninety the piers 30 and 32 development was your "legacy project." do you still feel that way. did you underestimate the intensity of the opposition to that? >> well i was always excited from day one where the owners came over and said we're really interested in coming to san francisco and what would be the place and we were there with the chairs, with the owners and the players on pier 3032 but we understand as time went on that it was getting more and more expensive. seismic retrofit of piers is extremely expensive. and, yeah, the waterfront is valued in many ways by people that live there and i think the warriors took all of that in consideration. we were still right down to just a month ago still ready to go at it but i think we pivot and we

pivot with the right reasons. warriors still want to be here, they're investor-confident in the city so i'm very happy, very happy to see them say, hey, not only do we have a place we can build, we own it now. so they're not leasing anymore,ened i think their investors are that much happier. >> so the folks who are behind proposition b which would require voter approval of any development that wants to exceed current height limits on the waterfront, they're hailing this move as a victory for them. the warriors moving to mission bay. where do you stand on prop b? >> well, first of all, good for them. you know, i have stayed away from prop b. i didn't want to get into another fight. i do see that, you know, ballot box development approvals is probably not the way to go. i do not want that to occur but i understand why it did. >> this is a city where the tech book is in full swing but the median home price is now approaching one million dollars.

a lot of people are feeling priced out. what are you doing to address this? >> well, first of all, thuy, i want to put in the good perspective. it's a good thing that we've got in challenge in that there's investor confidence and people want to move here, businesses. it's great for people who need jobs. that's still our number one priority. having said that, i recognize the challenge and the challenge is we have not built enough housing in the past. we kind of let that go as a priority and now we're going to suffer for it. so i want to build a lot of the housing that we need. i think we can definitely build a lot more affordable housing and work on the other things that make the city affordable. and it's not just about building. we also want to protect the existing housing stock, and that's why i'm working with senator leno to reform the ellis act to make sure we're not having these companies come in and build a business around evicting long-term tenants. i'm a big rent control supporter for that. i'm going to make sure 30,000 housing units get built and a

third of them permanently affordable and that will be a huge contribution to this landscape. >> but even so, there are many who feel that the essence of san francisco, what makes it special and unique, is being lost with all these changes going on. how do you balance that? the business growth with people feeling pushed out? >> well, but for the growth that's occurring we would haven't the revenues that we were seeking just literally three years ago to pay for important social programs that everybody values. the federal government is cutting hiv and aids research. there's a lot of issues around the homeless. we're not seeing a whole lot of federal dollars to we had to make it up ourselves and as a result i've got to have that increased revenue. i've got to have a revenue will pay for a housing trust fund at $1.5 billion to help with affordable housing. this wouldn't happen without a robust economy. >> let's talk about city college. the largest public college in california, serving nearly

80,000 students now facing losesing its accreditation. some people feel you haven't taken an aggressive enough stance to protect city college. >> oh, i've been very, very much interested in making sure that our city college is here. i've said that over and over again. it's about how you do it and certainly i'm well aware there's lawsuits, there's protests around this. i also want to make sure that the troubles that they had financially are taken care of because this is what started it. they were not going to be sustainable financially. they were, i think, on the cliff and we pulled them back, i think we did a lot of good things, particularly in the last year. and now we have a basis to suggest to the accreditation commission we're really close to being there. you have to recognize all the things that we've done and in that recognition i know that we've done you have no save city college. >> last me ask you real quickly

about leland yee, the corruption scandal involving state senator leland yee. are there reforms you would like to see come out of that? >> i'm one of the first people to say i'm shocked. a veteran public office holder can engage himself in the kinds of allegations that the fbi has uncovered. this is shocking to all of us. having said that, i think that the way we feel is that it's not so much new reform, it's getting back to the basics of public office. we have to honor our public and their trust. we have to rebuild it and that means more and more decisions that reflect this trust. >> let's end on good news. paul mccartney will be playing at candlestick, coming back to the venue where the beatles played their last concert in 1966. >> thuy, i'm going ask you what your favorite beatles song is as well. >> "love me do." and yours? >> oh, gosh, "she loves me" and these days it's about "hard

day's night." but i really want to thank sir paul mccartney. he's such a class act. he could have chosen any place around the world and he chose san francisco. >> mayor ed lee, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you, thuy. comedian and talk show host brian copeland knows how it feels to be an outsider. he grew up during the 1970s and was the only african-american student in san leandro high school of 350. as a kid he weathered physical abuse from his father, discrimination by local police and efforts by a racist landlord to evict his family from their apartment. he shaped those experiences into a one-man show "not a genuine black man." the 10th anniversary production opens at berklee rep. he sat down recently scott shafer. but, first, a clip from kqed's archives of "not a genuine black man" in 2005. >> i don't even know what that means. if you're talking about pigment clearly i am black but if you're talking about some cultural

delineation, i don't know. i don't talk ghetto. when i hear the word "ax" i think of it as a noun. [ laughter ] it's not aer have b. "i'm gonna ax my mother." what are you lizzie borden? get out of here! >> brian copeland, welcome. is. >> thanks for having me. is it bad form to laugh at my own jokes? >> not at all. >> the show begins with an anonymous letter from someone who accuses you of not being black enough. and when you boil that sentiment down what do you find? >> what you find is there are people in every culture who believe they are the police and they get to determine whether or not you are really an african-american or really a latino or -- i to do a thing with mike wallace a few years back and he asked me what the show was about and i told him and he laughed and he said every time i do a story that's even the least bit critical of israel i get all these letters saying you're not a real jew, a genuine

jew would never criticize israel under any circumstances. >> but that sentiment could come from an african-american, it could come from a white person or anyone else. is it different depending on who it comes from? >> i think it is. i do hear it more or have heard it more from african-americans and that letter came from an african-american. although from white people you do get "well, it's not like you're black." what do you mean by that? excuse me. the first question at the youtube debate in 2008 when barack obama was running was "are you black enough?" and he said "well, i can't get a cab." >> there's a riff in the show that i want to play a clip from where you talk about racial authenticity. i want to play that and then we'll come back and talk about it. >> what is it that makes the racial authenticity of a successful black male in this society suspect? it really pisses me off when i

think about it. because you go to east oakland or bay view, hunters point and you'll see all these guys selling crack and all these guys with five babies by five different women. none of them that they're supporting and nobody's saying they're not real black men. >> that's a very provocative question. what is it about a success that makes authenticity suspect? what do you make of that have? >> i think it's bizarre. it's the crap and the barrel mentality. that in some way if you have transcended your origins you are in some way selling out. and i found that fascinating that they will point for their folks who will point at a bill cosby, for example, and say bill cosby's not really black because of what it is he's done and achieved and accomplished. however, you know, if bill cosby were standing on a street corner selling cla ining crack they mi other things about him but they would never say he's not black and i find that to be bizarre. what is it about success that is somehow a betrayal of your

culture? i don't get it. >> this show is told, much of it, through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, you, living in san leandro back in the early '70s and it has some of the most difficult themes: domestic violence, your father knocking your mother against the wall, your attempted suicide. and yet it's very much interwoven with all that is humor. talk about that juxtaposition. >> when i first started to write this show i knew the rhythms i wanted. i wanted the rhythms that norman lear had in those great sitcoms from the '70s. because as a kid my mother would -- we's 'd sit on the floor and we'd watch "all in the family" and maude and then remember it was really funny and then edith got rained. this was a sitcom? where did this come from? then it was really funny again. that's how life is. then i watched the first few seasons and that's how i came up with one minute you're laughing then you're kicked in the gut.

then you're laughing then kicked in the gut. i dig a big hole then say something funny and pull you out of it. >> is that humor a way to bring people in so that they can really think about the nuances of prejudice and the other things you're talking about? >> oh, absolutely. it's the spoon this ful of suga like to say. otherwise it would be too painful for a lot of people to digest. >> i know you've got three kids. have they seen the show? i would guess they have. what do they think about it? how do they feel about the family's dirty laundry, so to speak, being aired? >> when the show opened my kids were 15 and 13 and the younger one was nine. in fact, i learned how to portray an eight-year-old boy because he was eight when i was writing the show and i watched him and how he talked and how he moved. it was a long time before i let him see it. the show ran seven years. because he was just too young. the older kids, i gave them a heads up and i had to tell them

about certain things and there is a scene where i'm really, really depressed and i talk about this experience i add in a car with carbon monoxide they didn't know about. and i kind of had to warn them and it was interesting that they came out of the show saying "wow, dad, we have a greater understanding of you because now we know what you dealt with and where you came from." >> and finally, you've been doing this show for ten years. how much of v things changes in san leandro and elsewhere? >> well, according to the latest census, san leandro is one of the most diverse cities in america. in america! when you look at the percentage of african-americans and asians and latinos and so forth in the country, san leandro mirrors that. so it's fascinating and it's great. >> well, the show, again, is called "not a genuine black man" playing at berklee repertoire theater through may. brian copeland, thanks for coming in. >> thanks for having me. pleasure.

joining me now for a look at other stories we're watching is scott shafer. hi scott. >> hi, thuy. >> four major tech companies settled a class action lawsuit and basically employees alleged that apple, google and others had an anti-poaching agreement to prevent them from stealing each other's employees. what do we know about the settlement? >> the parties themselves didn't reveal anything but reuters reported that the company has agreed to pay out some $324 million to the 64,000 employees that were part of this class action lawsuit. if it had gone to trial they were expecting to ask for as much as $3 billion. so they got a lot less than they might have gotten but they got the certainty of some kind of a settlement and so they don't to go to trial which could have dragged on and who knows what happens when you put it before a jury. >> what concerns besides the fact that there might have been a long trial, what concerns did the tech companies -- apple, google, intel -- have that made them want to set? >> once you go to trial and you have discovery and everyone is rooting through your files and

e-mails, embarrassing things come out. there was an e-mail that surfaced from steve jobs in 2005 to sergei bryn at google basically warning them "don't you dare go after these employees or it will be war." when that comes out some of the luster comes off of these companies, these innovative tech companies that have such great reputations in some circles. so i think they want to avoid that and make this all go away. >> what impact do you think this will have on silicon valley companies? >> the employees in question are the really high-demand programmers and those folks so their salaries are probably going go up because there will be bidding wars to get them to come work for one company or another. and head hunters and lawyers will benefit as well. let's move on to state politics because despite the rain we're getting this week, governor brown today issued a drought executive order. what does it do? >> a lot of things. it reiterates this is a big problem. it also waives environmental regulations which is a big deal for farmers when there's water transfers and, of course, it

concerns environmentalists any time you talk about waiving the california environmental quality act. but the governor kind of felt, obviously, that was that that was important to get water where it needs to go without red tape. >> also the governor is concerned about drought and climate change. he spoke with kqed this week. what did he say about that? >> he had a lot to say about climate change in the environment. one of the things we asked him about was the keystone pipeline which president obama is delaying a decision on. here's what he had to say about that. >> california is the leader so whatever obama ends up doing on keystone, i'm committed to having california lead the rest of the nation and the world in reducing the use of gasoline, oil, and all the other petroleum products, methane and all the rest of it so we don't destroy the fabric of life that we all depend on. >> and, of course, he had much more to say about a host of other issues and we'll have more from his interview next week.

thank you, scott. >> you bet, thank you. next week we will have much more from our in-depth interview with governor brown, we talk to him about his long-term vision for california and why he wants to seek an unprecedented fourth term as governor. for all of kqed's news coverage, please go to kqednews.org. >> i'm scott shafer, thanks for joining us. >> i'm thuy vu. have a good night.

- what path might you take in your quest for total health? - optimum health that encompasses mind, body, and spirit. - so join us now as we head to the frontiers of integrated health and well-being. - on healing quest. - hello. i'm judy brooks. - and i'm roy walkenhorst. and we have a terrific show for you today. - although we are missing one of our favorite people. - 'cause of olivia's busy schedule, she can't be here in person with us today. - but at least we have her with us through the magic of technology. - hello, judy and roy. olivia here. i just want to congratulate you on your tenth season of healing quest. i so enjoyed making the programs with you, bringing so much health and knowledge to so many people. congratulations on the show. miss you guys. lots of love. - thanks, olivia, and thank you for being such a wonderful part of healing quest