High court ruling makes statement on digital privacy
Majority opinion goes against access to location data
WASHINGTON — In a major statement on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that the government generally needs a warrant to collect troves of location data about the customers of cellphone companies.
“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
The 5-4 ruling will protect “deeply revealing” records associated with 400 million devices, the chief justice wrote. It did not matter, he wrote, that the records were in the hands of a third party. That aspect of the ruling was a significant break from earlier decisions.
The Constitution must take account of vast technological changes, Justice Roberts wrote, noting that digital data can provide a comprehensive, detailed—and intrusive — overview of private affairs that would have been impossible to imagine notlong ago.
The decision made exceptions for emergencies like bomb threats and child abductions. “Such exigencies,” he wrote, “include the need to pursue a fleeing suspect, protect individuals who are threatened with imminent harm or prevent the imminent destruction of evidence .”
In general, though, authorities must now seek a warrant for cell tower location information and, the logic of the decision suggests, other kinds of digital data that provide a detailed look at a person’s private life.
The decision thus has implications for all kinds of personal information held by third parties, including email and text messages, internet searches, and bank and credit card records. But Justice Roberts said the ruling had limits.
“We hold only that a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party,” the chief justice wrote. The court’s four more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan— joined his opinion.
Each of the four other justices wrote a dissent, with the five opinions running to more than 110 pages. In one dissent, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the distinctions drawn by the majority were illogical and “willfrustrate principled application of the Fourth Amendment in many routine yet vital law enforcement operations .”
“Cell-site records,” he wrote, “are uniquely suited to help the government develop probable cause to apprehend some of the nation’s most dangerous criminals: serial killers, rapists, arsonists, robbers, and so forth.”
In a second dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the decision “guaranteesa blizzard of litigation while threatening many legitimate and valuable investigative practices upon which law enforcement has rightfully come to rely.”
The case, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402, arose from armed robberies of Radio Shacks and other stores in the Detroit area starting in 2010.
Witnesses said Timothy Ivory Carpenter had planned the robberies, supplied guns and served as lookout, typically waiting in a stolen car across the street.
“At his signal, the robbers entered the store, brandished their guns, herded customers and employees to the back, and ordered the employeesto fill the robbers’ bags with new smartphones,” a court decision said, summarizing the evidenceagainst him.
Prosecutors also relied on months of records obtained from cellphone companies to prove their case. The records showed that Carpenter’s phone had been nearby when several of the robberies happened. He was convicted and sentenced to 116years in prison.
Carpenter’s lawyers said cellphone companies had turned over 127 days of records that placed his phone at 12,898 locations, based on information from cellphone towers. The records disclosed whether he had slept at home on givennights and whether he attended his usual church onSunday mornings.
Justice Roberts wrote that the information was entitled to privacy protection.
“Mapping a cellphone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts,” he wrote, going on to quote from an earlier opinion. “As with GPS information, the time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements,but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.’ “