High court bolsters digital privacy rights
Ruling limits warrantless searches of people on probation
The California Supreme Court strengthened the digital privacy rights of people on probation Thursday as it struck down a Bay Area court’s move to subject a juvenile offender to warrantless searches of his cellphone and social media accounts, even though his crime had nothing to do with his use of an electronic device.
It is the second ruling this week by California’s high court limiting when law enforcement can search for evidence without a warrant.
On Monday, the court threw out a legal standard from the late 1990s that had allowed for police to search people’s homes without a warrant in certain circumstances that are not emergencies. Police in that case had searched the Santa Barbara County home of a man they had just taken into custody after getting reports that he was suicidal and arrested him after finding illegal guns and evidence he was growing marijuana inside the home.
The “community caretaker” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless searches had allowed for officers to search people’s homes if they believed “someone inside needs help or property needs protection.” Finding that standard unconstitutional, the court ruled police can search someone’s home only if they have a warrant or there is evidence of an actual emergency.
Thursday’s unrelated decision in the digital privacy case was narrower, affecting only the rights of people on probation.
It centered on a juvenile probationer identified as Ricardo P., who was arrested in Santa Clara County in 2014 in two burglaries he committed with his adult cousins.
The Alameda County juvenile court that oversaw Ricardo’s probation required that he be subject to searches of his cellphone and online accounts at any time, for any reason, with no warrant.
Probation conditions that allow for broad searches of people’s cellphones, online accounts and computers aren’t necessarily uncon
stitutional, the court ruled. Such searches can be appropriate if an offender had used those devices in committing a crime or there is evidence from the offender’s history that the devices could be used in a future crime.
Ricardo’s cellphone and social media accounts were not connected to the burglaries he committed. The juvenile court instead justified the condition by noting a condition of Ricardo’s probation was that he not consume any illegal drugs and arguing that teenagers in general often post about drug use on social media.
Each of the court’s seven justices agreed those search conditions were too broad.
Writing for a four-justice majority, Justice Goodwin H. Liu wrote that the condition “imposes a very heavy burden on privacy with a very limited justif ication.” The justices ruled law enforcement can’t claim such broad authority to rifle through someone’s cellphone and social media accounts based on the possibility they might discuss criminal activity there.
“The (Supreme) Court says the record is way too thin to justify such a sweeping invasion into his private life,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, a researcher who teaches about cybersecurity law at Stanford University. “Probationers have reduced constitutional rights, but they still have rights, and if the state is to be allowed to intrude upon them to the severe degree that an electronics search condition permits, that invasion has to be justified, and it wasn’t here.”
Though the other three justices agreed that the probation conditions were too broad, in a dissent authored by Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye, they sided with the appellate court that heard Ricardo’s case. That court found the conditions could be constitutional if they were more narrowly tailored to apply only to evidence of drug use.