The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling this morning that will require authorities to obtain a warrant before searching the cell phone of a person who has been arrested.
MSNBC is reporting that the ruling, which was unanimous, involved two cases, one involving a smart phone and the other a conventional flip phone. In both cases, police used information from these phones to connect plaintiffs to crimes.
“San Diego Police used pictures in David Leon Riley’s smartphone, and the guns they found in his trunk after pulling him over for a traffic violation, to tie him to a local faction of the Bloods street gang and an earlier shooting,” MSNBC reports. “In Boston, Brima Wurie was arrested on suspicion of being involved in selling drugs and a picture linked to a phone call on his flip phone to a stash of crack cocaine.”
However, civil libertarian groups argued that in spite of recent advances in technology, individuals still maintain the right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers or effects” as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Therefore, police must seek a warrant before searching a suspect’s cell phone.
The Supreme Court agreed.
“Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “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. 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.”
He went on to say that “A cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house. A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form—unless the phone is.”
This is because cell phones are much more than just phones.
“The term ‘cell phone’ is itself misleading shorthand,” Roberts wrote. “Many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.”
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