Top US court tackles privacy rights
May impose limits on police to obtain cellphone data
US Supreme Court justices signaled on Wednesday they may impose limits on the ability of police to obtain cellphone data from wireless providers to track the location of criminal suspects in a major test of privacy rights in the digital age.
During arguments in the closely watched case involving a convicted robber, several of the nine justices across the ideological spectrum indicated concern about the use of data revealing a suspect’s past locations, based on the cellphone towers that relayed calls, without a court-issued warrant.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounded the alarm about the increasing amount of data that the government can potentially obtain, noting that most Americans “want to avoid Big Brother,” referring to the symbolic all-seeing leader in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
“They want to avoid the concept that government will be able to see and locate you anywhere you are at any point in time,” Sotomayor said.
The court potentially could rule that the practice by law enforcement authorities of obtaining such data without a warrant amounts to an unreasonable search and seizure under the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
Such a ruling would have a significant effect on law enforcement agencies that routinely request and receive this data from wireless providers in multitudes of criminal investigations as they try to link suspects to crimes.
The justices heard an extended 80-minute argument in an appeal brought by a man named Timothy Carpenter, convicted in several armed robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Ohio and Michigan with the help of past cellphone location data that linked him to the crime scenes. His American Civil Liberties Union lawyers have argued that without a warrant such data amounts to a Fourth Amendment violation.
There is a possibility the court’s four liberal justices could form a majority with one or more of the five conservatives, potentially including Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s newest member, Neil Gorsuch, who raised concerns from a property rights, rather than privacy rights, perspective.