Court bars police from accessing call listings and location without a warrant, in ‘most consequential privacy ruling in a generation’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A US supreme court ruling issued Friday barred police from accessing cellphone records such as call listings and location data without first obtaining a search warrant, in a landmark decision in favor of privacy protections.

Advocates hailed the 5-4 ruling as a victory for personal privacy rights in an age when digital technology and the widespread use of mobile devices could create easy paths for law enforcement or other state bodies into the most intimate corners of private life.

“This is this most important fourth amendment ruling in recent memory, and plainly the most important decision of this term,” wrote Bob Loeb, a former leader of the justice department’s appellate division who has argued cases before the high court, on Twitter.

The court ruling left open that collecting less than seven days of cell-site records may not be a search, noted Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of Southern California who was cited nine times in the opinion, on Twitter.

Chief justice John Roberts was joined by the court’s four liberal-leaning justices in writing for the majority in the case, Carpenter v United States. The four dissenting justices each wrote a separate dissent.

“A person does not surrender all fourth amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere,” Roberts wrote. He added that historical cellphone records “give the government near perfect surveillance and allow it to travel back in time.”

The majority in the case ruled that police had committed a privacy violation by seizing data from a cellphone provider that helped convict Timothy Carpenter in armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio.

Carpenter was sentenced to 116 years in prison. His lawyers argued that his fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures had been violated when police seized a list of every call that Carpenter had made over 127 days along with his locations during the calls.

“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,” Roberts wrote.

Advocates saw the case as a watershed test of how the court would apply privacy protections in the digital age, calling it “the most consequential privacy ruling in a generation”.

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“How the nine justices rule in Carpenter will affect the privacy rights of virtually every single American,” Trevor Timm wrote for the Guardian.

In deciding the case, the justices weighed traditional privacy protections against the unprecedented volume of personal data generated by the use of cellphones and other mobile devices that communicate with cellphone towers, which in turn collect reams of data retained by commercial service providers.

The lead dissent, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, argued that cellphone records were open to warrantless searches because they were not individual property.

The court has previously ruled that a search warrant was not necessary for the government to subpoena bank records or credit card statements from “third-party” businesses that create and keep such records, Kennedy pointed out.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in oral arguments in the case how vulnerable privacy was in the face of such a volume of data.

“A cellphone can be pinged in your bedroom,” she said. “It can be pinged at your doctor’s office. It can ping you in the most intimate details of your life. Presumably at some point even in a dressing room as you’re undressing.”





