LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
You're in the car. You get a message on your phone, and you take a quick peek. Studies say many of us still do it even though we know it is dangerous. It's also illegal in many states because it's such a big safety concern. Now New York is considering a law that would go beyond what any other state has done. NPR's Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: The man behind the bill is Ben Lieberman. He lost his 19-year-old son Evan after a crash in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, in 2011.
BEN LIEBERMAN: The driver of the car my son was in drifted over the yellow line and went head on into a Jeep Liberty.
ROSE: Evan Lieberman was in the backseat, wearing his seatbelt. He suffered massive internal injuries and died a month later. Ben Lieberman figured the police would investigate and look at the driver's cell phone. So Lieberman was surprised when they didn't.
LIEBERMAN: Driver said he fell asleep at the wheel. But when I finally got the cell phone records six agonizing months later, I saw texting throughout the drive and near the collision.
ROSE: Lieberman eventually got the driver's phone records himself. But he had to file a civil lawsuit to do it.
LIEBERMAN: There's a huge misunderstanding out there that police will look at phones at a crash or that they subpoena the phone records afterwards. Those are both very huge misconceptions.
ROSE: Law enforcement can subpoena records from the phone company or ask a judge for a warrant to search the phone itself. And sometimes police and prosecutors will do that, especially for a major crash with fatalities - But not always because it's a lot of money and time for cases that can be hard to prove.
TOM DINGUS: Oftentimes, drivers aren't willing to admit that they were texting on their cell phone or they were distracted by some other source. It's just under-reported.
ROSE: Tom Dingus studies distracted driving at Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. Police accident reports say distraction is a factor in less than 20 percent of crashes. But Dingus thinks the real number is much higher. When researchers at Virginia Tech put cameras in cars, they found that distracted drivers account for almost 70 percent of crashes.
DINGUS: They're looking at a cell phone. They're talking on a hand-held phone. They're tuning the radio, all of those things.
ROSE: Seventy percent of accidents you studied?
DINGUS: That's right, 70 percent of the time.
ROSE: Nearly all states have made it illegal to text and drive. Utah, Illinois, New Jersey and others impose big fines on drivers who get caught. But enforcement of those laws can be difficult. In New York, Ben Lieberman is proposing something that's never been tried before. He wants to build an electronic device that could plug right into a cell phone and tell police whether it was in use at the time of the crash.
LIEBERMAN: It's been nicknamed the textalyzer.
ROSE: Think breathalyzer but for text messages and other electronic distractions. Lieberman insists it would be designed not to look at sensitive stuff, like personal communications.
LIEBERMAN: You know, it's not going to have any embarrassing conversations, any embarrassing pictures. It's just going to show text in, text out. I don't think that you have to surrender all your privacy rights to get this right.
ROSE: Lieberman has been talking to the company Cellebrite about actually building the textalyzer. An accompanying bill has been introduced in the New York Legislature. But civil liberties advocates have big concerns. Mariko Hirose is a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union.
MARIKO HIROSE: There are so many ways in which somebody could be using the phone in a car that is not a violation of any laws.
ROSE: Looking at a map, for example, pulling over to the side of the road to send a text, using voice activation software, the list goes on. And that's not Hirose's only concern.
HIROSE: This bill is simply providing a way for law enforcement to get around the privacy protections that apply to a cell phone.
ROSE: But Tom Dingus at Virginia Tech thinks the textalyzer is worth a try.
DINGUS: You're putting other people at risk when you drive and text or drive and check stocks. It's not just your privacy. You're putting other people at risk.
ROSE: And maybe the threat of getting caught will help convince more drivers to put down their phones. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
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