Court protects digital privacy

Justices say search warrant needed to track cellphones

WASHINGTON – A deeply divided Supreme Court once again defended digital privacy rights Friday in a decision with implications for anyone who carries a cellphone.

The justices ruled 5-4 that police need a warrant to access data from mobile service providers that shows where an individual has traveled over weeks, months or even years.

The opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by the court’s four liberal justices, follows a long line of cases in which the court has reinterpreted the constitutional right to privacy for the digital age.

Most recently, the justices ruled that police cannot use GPS equipment to track vehicles or search cellphones without a warrant.

But unlike those unanimous rulings, Friday’s came with four vociferous dissents from the court’s other four conservative justices that ran for 92 pages.

Three of them warned that the decision would tie the hands of police investigating violent crimes. Justice Neil Gorsuch aligned himself with privacy rights but under a different theory.

The case grew out of a series of armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio in 2010 and 2011.

To prosecute its case against Timothy Carpenter, the government obtained cellphone records that revealed his approximate location over 127 days, placing him near four of the crimes.

The records were obtained under the Stored Communications Act of 1986, which allows phone companies to turn over records if the government has reasonable grounds to believe they will help a criminal investigation.

In 2016, police made some 125,000 requests for data from Verizon and AT&T alone.

Courts routinely grant those requests. Nine states, including California, already require a search warrant, which is harder for police to get.

Lower courts upheld the search of cell tower records under the “thirdparty doctrine,” used in earlier Supreme Court cases to uphold government access to suspects’ bank records, as well as phone numbers called from landlines.

Consumers should know that wireless carriers can track them, the theory goes, so their locations are not private.

But the court ruled that cellphone location data are different.

When the court decided two cases in the 1970s under the third-party doctrine, Roberts said, “few could have imagined a society in which a phone goes wherever its owner goes, conveying to the wireless carrier not just dialed digits but a detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s movements.”