Supreme Court to Decide if Police Can Search a Cell Phone Without a Warrant
From the NYT:
WASHINGTON — In a major test of how to interpret the Fourth Amendment in the digital age, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider two cases about whether the police need warrants to search the cellphones of the people they arrest.
“The implications of these cases are huge,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, noting that about 12 million people are arrested every year, often for minor offenses, and that about 90 percent of Americans have cellphones.
...Others say there must be a different standard because of the sheer amount of data on and available through cellphones. In February, for instance, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals suppressed evidence found on the phone of a high school student who was arrested on charges of causing a disturbance on a school bus. “Searching a person’s cellphone,” the court said, “is like searching his home desk, computer, bank vault and medicine cabinet all at once.”
Officials in California told the justices that searches are required because cellphones can be used to set off bombs. Mr. Riley’s lawyers responded that “this scarcely resonates as an everyday concern.”
Not mentioned, but far more important is how this will be used as precedent to justify searching other electronic or biological data points as technology develops. Any piece of data that can be stored digitally will be up for scrutiny.
Read the rest.
