On Wednesday June 25, 2014, the United States Supreme Court passed a unanimous ruling that requires police officers to obtain a warrant to search the cell phones and personal electronic devices of a person arrested. In a 9-0 decision, this is the first computer-search case that Supreme Court has ruled on and the justices’ opinions indicate strong support for the protection of privacy of the nearly 12 million citizens that are arrested each year in the United States. Privacy advocates are hailing this ruling as a landmark victory because it advances and more clearly defines our modern privacy rights and promises protection for the future of a digital age democracy. However, it is imperative this ruling be evaluated in the broader context of privacy in a digital age. Despite the gratifying decision, the court ignored a major contingent in the larger privacy debate: the NSA’s continued role in collecting, storing and unwarranted searching of massive quantities of data that could be used by the police to criminalize individuals.
In two separate yet similar cases, Riley v. State of California and United States v. Wurie, defendants were prosecuted for crimes that were only made known when police searched through their cell phones. In San Diego, David Riley was connected and charged for an earlier gang shooting based on evidence police found on Riley’s smartphone. After being pulled over for expired license plate registration, Riley’s vehicle was impounded, his cell phone seized and officers searched Riley’s car and found semiautomatic weapons. One of the officers noticed evidence of gang affiliation and subsequently accessed the contents of Riley’s smartphone to find any other signs that would connect Riley to the Bloods gang. Solely using pictures, videos, and text messages from his phone, Riley was then charged with firing at an occupied vehicle, assault with a semiautomatic firearm, and attempted murder.
In Boston, police arrested Brima Wurie on suspicion of dealing cocaine. Using information found from his cell phone’s call log, police were able to determine where Wurie lived and obtained a warrant to search Wurie’s home. Police found over 200 grams of cocaine and marijuana along with a gun and ammunition. The evidence police found was enough to produce a conviction and a 20-year prison term. Neither of these convictions would have been possible without the police searching the personal phones of the defendants.
Chief Justice Roberts argued that searching cell phones was akin to searching homes, something that citizens are constitutionally protected against by the Fourth Amendment. “A cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house,” wrote Roberts in the court’s opinion. “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.” Essentially, the Supreme Court has ruled that unwarranted searches of personal electronic devices are illegal. Yet, Chief Justice Roberts does not challenge the unfettered access to sensitive records the NSA collects and stores. In fact, Roberts writes in a footnote, “These cases do not implicate the question whether [sic] the collection or inspection of aggregated digital information amounts to a search under other circumstances.”
Legal analysts say this ruling will extend to the NSA and falls outside the scope of the central issue at hand. However, as privacy revelations continue to surface from the documents obtained and released by Edward Snowden, we as citizens have evidence that the NSA has been performing unwarranted searches on our personal metadata for years now. Although the Supreme Court deliberately avoided addressing mass collection and storage of personal data, this ruling indicates the justices are fully aware of the fact that technology is generating and storing large quantities of data about us against our will. This ruling indicates that the Supreme Court is becoming more responsive to how digital information shapes our society. At best, this ruling is a promising precedent for future cases that will challenge the government’s use of technology, including NSA surveillance.