Supreme Court says warrant necessary for Police access to phone location data in win for privacy
Supreme Court
says warrant necessary for phone location data in win for privacy
US justices say law
enforcement needs a warrant to follow your digital footprint.
The Supreme Court decided whether prosecutors violated the Fourth
Amendment by collecting a criminal suspect's cellphone location and movement
data without a warrant.
In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices decided
that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for trials. The
Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Sixth Circuit court's decision.
Carpenter v. United States is
the first case about phone location
data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That
makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use
technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov.
29.
The dispute dates back to a
2011 robbery in Detroit, after which police gathered months of phone location
data from Timothy Carpenter's phone provider. They pulled together 12,898
different locations from Carpenter, over 127 days.
The legal and privacy concern
was that police gathered the four months' worth of Carpenter's digital
footprints without a warrant. A Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge ruled that
cellphone location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which forbids
unreasonable search and seizure, and therefore didn't require a warrant.
In the Supreme Court's
ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the government's searches of
Carpenter's phone records were considered a Fourth Amendment search.
"The Government's
position fails to contend with the seismic shifts in digital technology 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," he wrote.
Roberts pointed out that
allowing government access to historical GPS data infringes on Carpenter's
Fourth Amendment protections and expectation of privacy, by providing law
enforcement with an "all-encompassing record" of his whereabouts. He
added that historical GPS data presents an "even greater privacy
risk" than real-time GPS monitoring.
Carpenter's attorneys,
including lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, argued before the
Supreme Court that cellphone location data constitutes sensitive digital
records and should be protected under the Fourth Amendment.
"This is a
groundbreaking victory for Americans' privacy rights in the digital age,"
ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, who argued the case, said in a statement.
"The Supreme Court has given privacy law an update that it has badly
needed for many years, finally bringing it in line with the realities of modern
life. The government can no longer claim that the mere act of using technology
eliminates the Fourth Amendment's protections."
Phone location data is a hot
button issue for privacy advocates. In May, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from
Oregon, asked phone service providers why they were giving away location data to Securus
Technologies, a service that monitors calls to prison inmates, which
police could use to track anybody's phone in the US, without a warrant.
The Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation
into LocationSmart in May this year, a company that boasted
that it could find any phone in the US without needing special permission.
Wyden said Friday's ruling
was a "welcome step" for privacy and fighting against the expanding
power of government surveillance.
"The court's recognition
that digital devices can generate 'near-perfect surveillance' of a person's
private life is a validation of the vital protections against unreasonable
search and seizure provided by our Constitution," the senator said.
The losing argument was that
phone companies can provide customers' data to law enforcement because they own
those records, not the person. During the trial, US Deputy Solicitor General
Michael Dreeben told the Supreme Court that people agree to
hand over their information to providers for their service.
"It is asking a business
to provide information about the business' own transactions with a
customer," Dreeben said in November.
Before the trial took place, major
tech companies, including Apple, Facebook and Google, filed a
friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court, urging the justices
to make it harder for law enforcement officials to obtain individuals' data
without a warrant.
While the decision sets a
ruling for historical GPS data, the Supreme Court said it does not apply to
security cameras, business records or real-time location tracking.
In a tweet, the ACLU's deputy legal director called
the decision a "civil liberties VICTORY."
Civil liberties VICTORY in @ACLU's
Carpenter v. United States case! Supreme Court holds that government generally
needs a warrant to get past cell phone site location information. Congrats to
my colleague @NateWessler who argued this case
brilliantly. pic.twitter.com/ltC1kTIb7A
The Chief Justice, speaking simple truth. A vindication
of our Fourth Amendment rights. Carpenter v. United States pic.twitter.com/Rvcv6vzg2j
The Supreme Court just ruled the government's decades-old
practice of warrantlessly tracking your historical movements via cellphone
records (CSLI) has in many cases violated the constitutional right to privacy.
Major victory for @ACLU
― and America. #GetAWarrant #Carpenter
"This decision will
provide users with the confidence that the sensitive location data they share
with innovative digital devices and services will only be disclosed to law
enforcement with a warrant based on probable cause," he said.
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