SC issues major ruling in favor of digital privacy

Tilted

Tilted

..
The Supreme Court just handed down its ruling in Riley v California and United States v Wurie. The Chief Justice writes for a unanimous court finding that, in general, the police need a search warrant to search the contents of a cellphone seized from an arrestee.

I think this is the right ruling, and I think the broader notion that the Court is seemingly adopting could have major implications down the road and in other contexts. The Constitution - and freedom, the rights of individuals over the interests of the state - won a big victory. It's about time, those things have been getting the worst of the fight for quite a while.
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
Here is the opinion in Riley v California. The two cellphone cases were combined.

As I noted above, the Chief Justice wrote for a unanimous court, but Justice Alito wrote an opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment. In other words, Justice Alito didn't agree with something or some things that the Chief said (and which all the rest of the Justices, more or less, agreed with).
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
This finding is, in its essence, what I'd suggest could have major implications for issues that will arise in the future and for some that have already arisen:

A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee’s pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but more substantial privacy interests are at stake when digital data is involved.
Click to expand...
 
Chris0nllyn

Chris0nllyn

Well-Known Member
Tilted said:
Here is the opinion in Riley v California. The two cellphone cases were combined.

As I noted above, the Chief Justice wrote for a unanimous court, but Justice Alito wrote an opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment. In other words, Justice Alito didn't agree with something or some things that the Chief said (and which all the rest of the Justices, more or less, agreed with).
Click to expand...

Pretty cut and dry.

Modern cell phones are not just another technologicalconvenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life,” Boyd, supra, at 630. The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of theprotection 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.
Click to expand...
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
And the Chief Justice sums up:

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,” Boyd, supra, at 630. 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.
Click to expand...

I thought these rulings might go this general way. But I'm fairly surprised (1) that it was a unanimous decision and (2) that it provides such a categorical rule. It leaves in places the exigency exception, but I thought even a ruling in favor of the citizens in these cases might have allowed for some additional bases on which officers could search certain parts of the information on cellphones. For instance, I thought that law enforcement might be allowed to search, without a warrant, basic call history because it's otherwise available without a warrant (i.e. from service providers).

This is a much more of a win than I expected. I'm happy to have been wrong.
 
LibertyBeacon

LibertyBeacon

Unto dust we shall return
Interesting this case was unanimous. Often times people are perplexed by 5-4 (i.e., "close") rulings, but the idea is that if the legal concepts were easy to sort out the case wouldn't need to get to the SCOTUS to be sorted. With a unanimous decision, it makes you wonder how the state and appellate courts messed up so badly.

The Court still allows searches in an "emergency", so this is not a complete immunity from searches. But it does seem this finding is on balance protective of digital information, and the legal reasoning is applicable to things outside of the cellphone domain.

Definitely the correct finding.
 
Tilted

Tilted

..
LibertyBeacon said:
Interesting this case was unanimous. Often times people are perplexed by 5-4 (i.e., "close") rulings, but the idea is that if the legal concepts were easy to sort out the case wouldn't need to get to the SCOTUS to be sorted. With a unanimous decision, it makes you wonder how the state and appellate courts messed up so badly.

The Court still allows searches in an "emergency", so this is not a complete immunity from searches. But it does seem this finding is on balance protective of digital information, and the legal reasoning is applicable to things outside of the cellphone domain.

Definitely the correct finding.
Click to expand...

Though it may run contrary to common perceptions, most of the Court's decisions - at least this term - have been unanimous. In most other terms unanimous decisions may not have represented an actual majority of cases, but they represented a large portion of them - at least a plurality more often than not I would guess.

And as for the exceptions in cases of emergency, I don't think there was ever a chance that the Court was going to eliminate the exigency rationales (e.g. for the safety of officers) for warrantless, incident-to-arrest, searches when it comes to cellphones specifically. Such exigency arguments would seem likely to work far less likely when it comes to searching through digital contents of cellphones than in other contexts though. In other words, I don't think they amount to much in the way of real-world exceptions when it comes to such devices.
 
Chris0nllyn

Chris0nllyn

Well-Known Member
Tilted said:
Though it may run contrary to common perceptions, most of the Court's decisions - at least this term - have been unanimous. In most other terms unanimous decisions may not have represented an actual majority of cases, but they represented a large portion of them - at least a plurality more often than not I would guess.

And as for the exceptions in cases of emergency, I don't think there was ever a chance that the Court was going to eliminate the exigency rationales (e.g. for the safety of officers) for warrantless, incident-to-arrest, searches when it comes to cellphones specifically. Such exigency arguments would seem likely to work far less likely when it comes to searching through digital contents of cellphones than in other contexts though. In other words, I don't think they amount to much in the way of real-world exceptions when it comes to such devices.
Click to expand...

If we are seeing this many unanimous decisions it makes me wonder if they are taking the "easy" cases.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top