“The American Civil Liberties Union deserves congratulations” is not a sentence one is accustomed to read from the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, but it just goes to show how pervasive the Carpenter case was that the Supreme Court decided last week.
As you may recall, Carpenter is a case where two guys in Detroit were accused of robbery, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used their cellphones to prove that they were nearby a number of the incidents. To do this, the FBI went to the suspects’ cellphone providers and obtained a lot of data about the suspects’ locations – more than 12,000 for one guy, and almost 24,000 for the other guy. The defense attorneys for the guys are saying that the phones revealed so much personal data about the guys that a warrant should have been required for the search.
“Prosecutors didn’t seek a warrant for the cell-site data, which would have required a showing of probable cause to believe the records show evidence of a crime,” write Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall in the Wall Street Journal. “Instead, they sought the data under the Stored Communications Act, which requires only ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe the information is relevant to an investigation.” The defense attorneys for the guys were saying that the phones revealed so much personal data about the guys that a warrant should have been required for the search.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed.
“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” writes Chief Justice John Roberts in his decision. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of [cell site location information], its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such information is gathered by a third party [the cell phone companies] does not make it any less deserving of Fourth Amendment protection.”
A big part of this case was the Riley case from a couple of years back. Riley had already ruled that law enforcement officials needed a warrant to search someone’s cell phone. So it wasn’t a big stretch to add to it by saying that law enforcement also needed a warrant to search the places someone’s cell phone had been.
The other was Jones, which we haven’t written about before, at least under that name. It’s the 2012 case where the Supreme Court ruled that collection of data from a GPS tracker required a warrant. In Carpenter, law enforcement argued that the cellphone tower location data was less specific than the data from a GPS tracker, so it didn’t require the same level of protection. But the Court didn’t buy it.
There are, however, still a few concerning aspects.