SCOTUS decided Carpenter vs US: police needs a warrant to search past location data from a suspect’s cellphone
On June 22, 2018, the Supreme Court decided an important privacy case. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Sixth Circuit’s decision holding that the protection granted under the Fourth Amendment does prevent the government to access business records from the defendants’ wireless carriers revealing the user’s location without a warrant.
In Carpenter v. United States, Timothy Carpenter and Timothy Sanders were convicted of nine armed robberies. The government’s evidence at trial included business records from the defendants’ wireless carriers. Defendant argued that government’s collection of those records constituted a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The Sixth Circuit rejected the Forth Amendment argument and affirmed the district Court judgment holding that defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in cell phone business records dealing with routing information rather than the content of the related communications. See here for more information.
The Supreme Court disagreed and in a 5-4 decision deemed that the collection of the cell phone records is a Fourth Amendment search. “The Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests but certain expectations of privacy as well … official intrusion into that sphere generally qualifies as a search and requires a warrant supported by probable cause”. “Seismic shifts in digital technology” have allowed wireless carriers to collect “deeply revealing” information that made possible the “tracking of not only Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s, not for a short period but for years and years”, and that should be protected by the Constitution. Law enforcement officials shall not have “unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information.” However, Chief Justice Roberts characterized the ruling as a narrow one that applies only to historical cell-site location information (CSLI). The ruling does not “express a view on matters not before the court … and does not consider other collection techniques” (such as obtaining cell-site location records in real time, or getting information about all of the phones that connected to a particular tower at a particular time). He also acknowledged that “exceptions may support a warrantless search of an individual’s cell-site records under certain circumstances”, for example when law enforcement officials need to pursue a fleeing suspect or deal with emergencies such as “bomb threats, active shootings, and child abductions.”
The decision drew criticism from the dissenting justices. It may imperil “many legitimate and valuable investigative practices on which law enforcement has rightfully come to rely.”
In addition, dissenting justice Alito made a guess on where today’s decision will lead. “One possibility is that the broad principles that the Court seems to embrace will be applied across the board. All subpoenas duces tecum and all other orders compelling the production of documents will require a demonstration of probable cause, and individuals will be able to claim a protected Fourth Amendment interest in any sensitive personal information about them that is collected and owned by third parties. Those would be revolutionary developments indeed. The other possibility is that this Court will face the embarrassment of explaining in case after case that the principles on which today’s decision rests are subject to all sorts of qualifications and limitations that have not yet been discovered. If we take this latter course, we will inevitably end up “mak[ing] a crazy quilt of the Fourth Amendment”.
More information on Carpenter v. United States, is available at http://www.scotusblog.com…
Originally published on Technethics on June 2018