Smartphone and cloud technology is not going away — it’s doing the opposite.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, as of January 2014, 90 percent of American adults owned a cellphone, and nearly two-thirds of them had smartphones. According to the study, a third of American adults described their cellphones as “something they can’t imagine living without.”

And neither can the government.

Cellphone records and a person’s electronic data are becoming important tools for law enforcement agencies and — as revealed by the documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden — American spy agencies.

With all of this in mind, Missouri legislators this spring approved a ballot measure that asks voters to amend the state constitution to include a person’s electronic communication and data under protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures performed by the government.

The question about whether electronic data already falls under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has not yet been answered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Privacy and technology have been considered by the court in the past. In 1967, the court ruled against the FBI after the agency eavesdropped on a suspect with a secret electronic listening device in a telephone booth. With new technology advances, the legal issues have continued to evolve.

“There is some core precedent, but this is a frontier portion of the law,” said Josh Hawley, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Missouri’s School of Law. In Fourth Amendment case-law, there are two types of privacy: privacy of seclusion, such as your home, and privacy of secrecy, such as a private conversation.

The high court heard arguments in the cases in April and is expected to rule this summer.

For law enforcement, there is a legal doctrine called “incident to arrest” that allows officers to search someone who has been arrested. The unanswered question is whether a person’s cellphone and the troves of data within it are subject to that same doctrine. Hawley, a former clerk to U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, said that without a warrant or reasonable cause to search, the court has sided against law enforcement being allowed to search someone’s computer.

More on The Joplin Globe.