Supreme Court: Warrant Is Required To Search Cell Phones

OFF THE WIRE
Know your rights! They cannot legally search your phone.
A unanimous Supreme Court decision ruled police need a warrant to search the cell phone of a person who has been arrested, except in special circumstances. Interestingly, wikileaks has also shown the CIA uses our phones to spy on us. It is important to know your rights when you are stopped by police.
“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.”

MSNBC reported the high court took two cases involving cell phone searches, one involving a smartphone and the other involving a relatively basic flip phone. In both cases, police used information on each phone to connect the 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. 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.

The decision will likely have long-lasting implications for digital privacy, far beyond the immediate concern surrounding how and when police can search a mobile device. Police are typically allowed to search an individual after an arrest, but Roberts wrote that the amount of personal information contained on a cell phone made such a search different from the usual objects authorities might find when asking someone to empty their pockets.
“A cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house,” he wrote. “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.”

Understandably, the court still allows the exception in cases where there is imminent danger to someone:

The court held that the “exigent circumstances” exception to the warrant requirement also applied to cell phones – that is, imminent danger to life or the possibility that evidence would be destroyed might justify searching a phone without a warrant. Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurrence, opened the door to further exceptions. Alito wrote that he would “reconsider the question presented here if either Congress or state legislatures, after assessing the legitimate needs of law enforcement and the privacy interests of cell phone owners, enact legislation that draws reasonable distinctions based on categories of information or perhaps other variables.”

Civil libertarian groups argued that advances in technology mean that the right of individuals to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers or effects” as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution mean that police should seek warrants before searching suspects’ mobile devices. The government’s opinion was that people do not deserve the right to privacy or security because phones aid criminals, and remote wiping and encryption could be used to destroy or conceal evidence of serious crimes.

Ultimately, court was unanimous in its judgment when it sided with the people and civil liberties groups in their interpretation of the fourth amendment.