By Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
Today, the Supreme Court ruled that the police need a warrant to search through data on an individual’s cell phone. The importance of this ruling should not be understated. The decision takes a contrary position to a long-standing practice by American law enforcement officials.
It has been taken for granted that cell phones were an exception to the Fourth Amendment and therefore could be searched without a warrant and information obtain could be collected from them at any time; even without probable cause or reasonable suspicions to search and seize private property and data.
Part of this delay was the slow speed of the Court to recognizing the disconnect of technology’s rapid acceleration and the vastly mixed interpretations of the Constitution regarding the issue. Federal courts had previously been inconsistent but strongly sided with law enforcement during the 9/11 era. The ruling sets the balance back o former times.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) phrased the ruling as: “a wake-up call that we need to update our laws to keep pace with technological advances.”
Justice Department spokeswoman Ellen Canale assured the public that: “The department will work with its law-enforcement agencies to ensure full compliance with this decision. Our commitment to vigorously enforcing the criminal laws and protecting the public while respecting the privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment is unwavering.”
As always, [public] emergencies are the exception or to stop a crime in progress under “exigent circumstances.” The decision is mainly to prevent intrusion of into private lives through a highly used digital medium that includes massive personal data that includes location history, contacts, call history, internet browsing, social media updates, tweets, etc. that might be placed on file and irrelevant to a case. Such information is now ruled protected under the Fourth Amendment.
Chief Justice John Roberts concluded his decision with: “We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime. Cell phones have become important tools in facilitating coordination and communication among members of criminal enterprises, and can provide valuable incriminating information about dangerous criminals. Privacy comes at a cost. Our holding, of course, is not that the information on a cell phone is immune from search; it is instead that a warrant is generally required before such a search, even when a cell phone is seized incident to arrest.”
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