SC to tackle privacy case
Top court rules against SEC
WASHINGTON, June 5, (Agencies): The US Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a major case on privacy rights in the digital age that will determine whether police officers need warrants to access past cellphone location information kept by wireless carriers.
The justices agreed to hear an appeal brought by a man who was arrested in 2011 as part of an investigation into a string of armed robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in the Detroit area over the preceding months. Police helped establish that the man, Timothy Carpenter, was near the scene of the crimes by securing cell site location information from his cellphone carrier.
At issue is whether failing to obtain a warrant violates a defendant’s right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures under the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
The information that law enforcement agencies can obtain from wireless carriers shows which local cellphone towers users connect to at the time they make calls. Police can use historical data to determine if a suspect was in the vicinity of a crime scene or real-time data to track a suspect.
Fight
The legal fight has raised questions about how much companies protect the privacy rights of their customers. The big four wireless carriers, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, receive tens of thousands of requests a year from law enforcement for what is known as “cell site location information,” or CSLI.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that struck down 28 state House and Senate districts in North Carolina because they violated the rights of black voters. But the justices rejected the court’s order to redraw the districts and hold a special election.
The action by the justices Monday sends the matter back to the lower court, which could order new districts in time for the regular cycle of elections in 2018.
Democrats hope new district maps will help them break the Republican stranglehold on the state legislature.
Democrats need to capture three House seats or six Senate seats currently held by Republicans to eliminate the GOP’s veto-proof majorities. That would enhance the power of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.
In another development, a unanimous Supreme Court says religious hospitals don’t have to comply with federal laws protecting pension benefits for workers.
Justice
The justices on Monday ruled in favor of three church-affiliated nonprofit hospital systems being sued for underfunding pension plans covering about 100,000 employees.
Two of the hospitals are Catholic affiliates and the third has Lutheran ties. The hospitals argued that their pensions are “church plans” exempt from the law and have been treated as such for decades by federal officials. They sought to overturn three lower court rulings against them.
Workers argued that Congress never meant to exempt them and say the hospitals are shirking legal safeguards that could jeopardize retirement benefits.
Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court on Monday scaled back the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power to recover ill-gotten profits from defendants’ misconduct, handing Wall Street firms a victory and dealing another blow to the regulator’s enforcement powers.
In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court found that the SEC’s recovery remedy known as “disgorgement” is subject to a five-year statute of limitations. The justices sided with New Mexico-based investment adviser Charles Kokesh, who previously was ordered by a judge to pay $2.4 million in penalties plus $34.9 million in disgorgement of illegal profits after the SEC sued him.