USSC ruling bans cell phone searches

Good day all. The United States Supreme Court is releasing a number of decisions today. Some will be their typical muddle headed rulings and some will be good but narrow decisions. One has just come out that will send shockwaves through law enforcement at all levels.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court has ruled that police may not search through someone’s cell phone without a search warrant. Here are the details from the Washington Times:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police cannot go snooping through people’s cell phones without a warrant, in a unanimous decision that amounts to a major statement in favor of privacy rights.

Police have long taken people’s cell phones and rifled through them looking for criminal evidence. Usually the only way you could slow them down was to password protect the device, and that would only slow them down, not stop them.

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.

Being asked to turn out your pockets is allowed as a matter of protection. You might have a weapon and be a threat to the police. However, this to has been abused. (See NYC Stop and Frisk) However, this is another court case.

The ruling amounts to a 21st century update to legal understanding of privacy rights.

“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.

It’s unusual to have a unanimous decision from the court, so they all seem to understand what was involved. I expect they all use cell phones themselves and probably smart phones which is the real target of this ruling.

“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.”

What’s so hard about that? Getting a warrant these days is almost as easy as a prosecutor indicting a Bologna sandwich. Not that hard at all. And the ruling is even tougher then at first glance.

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.

Yep, I think the justices researched this decision carefully, probably by looking at the contents of their own phones. Now here is the reasoning from the justices.

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.”

I have a suspicion that more than a few of the justices of both financial and medial apps on their Iphones and Android devices and they don’t like the idea of some Barney Fife wannabe digging through their information and records. Chief Justice Roberts also cited precedent. (The courts LOVE precedent)

The chief justice cited court precedent that found a difference between asking someone to turn out his pockets versus “ransacking his house for everything which may incriminate him” — and the court found that a cellphone calls into that second category.

Roberts also brought up cloud computing. Law Enforcement has also used that as an excuse to ransack people’s electronics.

Complicating matters further is the question of where the data is actually stored. The Obama administration and the state of California, both of which sought to justify cell phone searches, acknowledged that remotely stored data couldn’t be searched — but Chief Justice Roberts said with cloud computing, it’s now sometimes impossible to know the difference.

I know that on my phone, I tie into a number of sources and my data does NOT reside on the device. Get into it and you will see some personal stuff I don’t want you to. (Which is why everyone at Anger Central has their phones set up for remote locking and wiping if lost) Now, I wonder how this will affect the NSA’s trolling for data?

The court did carve out exceptions for “exigencies” that arise, such as major security threats.

And would you care to wager that there will be a number of “Major security threats” that will require the NSA to search through every cell phone in America? Well, that’s another case and I expect we will be seeing that one showing up soon enough.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~