Supreme Court Strikes Down Warrantless Cell Phone Searches
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision today, ruling against warrantless searches of cell phones, and the data contained therein.
This is just the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions going against the Obama administration, as they recently ruled to limit the reach of the EPA and struck down a power grab by Obama’s Justice Department.
This decision, while aimed at police searches of cell phones incident to arrest, bears major ramifications towards the warrantless searches of individual’s cell phone data by the NSA, which has already been ruled unconstitutional by a federal Judge.
The Washington Times is reporting that the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that police cannot search through a person’s cell phone without a warrant, deciding in favor of privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment.
Police agencies had argued that searching through the data on cell phones was no different than asking someone to turn out his pockets, but the justices rejected that, saying a cell phone is more fundamental.
“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,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the unanimous court.
“Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple— get a warrant.”
Justices even said police cannot check a cellphone’s call log, saying even those contain more information that just phone numbers, and so perusing them is a violation of privacy that can only be justified with a warrant.
The chief justice said cellphones are different not only because people can carry around so much more data — the equivalent of millions of pages of documents — that police would have access to, but that the data itself is qualitatively different than what someone might otherwise carry.
He said it could lay bare someone’s entire personal history, from their medical records to their “specific movements down to the minute.”
You can read the Court’s ruling and opinion here.
This is a major win for the Fourth Amendment and privacy rights. All of a person’s private information can now be contained on a cell phone, and the court has ruled that a cell phone is now the equivalent of a person’s “papers and effects”, which are protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures” without a warrant.
Hopefully, when the Court eventually rules on a case specifically relating to the NSA spying and data collecting, they will remain consistent with the precedent that they just set, and protect the privacy of the individual.
