Unanimous SCOTUS Strikes Warrantless Cellpohne Searches

Supreme Court says police must get warrants for most cellphone searches

Quote:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that police generally must obtain a warrant before searching the cellphone of someone they arrest, saying it was applying to modern technology the same privacy rights that date back to the nation’s birth. Modern cellphones “hold for many Americans the privacies of life,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, in a sweeping opinion that seemed to contain warnings about the government’s ability to monitor the private lives of its citizens. “The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought,” he wrote. Roberts said that in most cases when police seize a cellphone from a suspect, the answer is simple: “Get a warrant.”

From the SCOTUS Blog analysis:

Quote:

The Court rejected every argument made to it by prosecutors and police that officers should be free to inspect the contents of any cellphone taken from an arrestee. It left open just one option for such searches without a court order: if police are facing a dire emergency, such as trying to locate a missing child or heading off a terrorist plot. But even then, it ruled, those “exigent” exceptions to the requirement for a search warrant would have to satisfy a judge after the fact. The ruling was such a sweeping embrace of digital privacy that it even reached remotely stored private information that can be reached by a hand-held device — as in the modern-day data storage “cloud.” And it implied that the tracking data that a cellphone may contain about the places that an individual visited also is entitled to the same shield of privacy.

Chief Justice Roberts, delivering the Court's opinion in Riley v. California :

Quote:

Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be carried on an arrestee’s person. Notably, modern cell phones have an immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and generally constituted only a narrow intrusion on privacy. But cell phones can store millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures, or hundreds of videos. This has several interrelated privacy consequences. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second, the phone’s capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible. Third, data on the phone can date back for years. In addition, an element of pervasiveness characterizes cell phones but not physical records. A decade ago officers might have occasionally stumbled across a highly personal item such as a diary, but today many of the more than 90% of American adults who own cell phones keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives. The scope of the privacy interests at stake is further complicated by the fact that the data viewed on many modern cell phones may in fact be stored on a remote server. Thus, a search may extend well beyond papers and effects in the physical proximity of an arrestee, a concern that the United States recognizes but cannot definitively foreclose.

via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1lUPbw9