Opposing view: Court ruling threatens investigations

On Friday, the Supreme Court upset the carefully considered balance Congress enacted between the privacy interests in personal location information collected by cellular telephone companies and society’s need to investigate serious crimes.

While those privacy interests are not insubstantial, the National District Attorneys Association believes Congress’ carefully crafted compromise shouldn’t have been discarded. In its place, the court majority constructed a perplexing distinction between personal information the Supreme Court considers worthy of Fourth Amendment protection and equally personal information that the court acknowledges merits no constitutional protection.

As the majority recognizes, law enforcement can legitimately use a subpoena to obtain much of the personal data we disclose in our daily transactions, including banking records and the phone numbers we call. But the court provides no explanation of why our location, often apparent to friends, neighbors and even strangers, is more private than this unprotected data.

Now, with the Carpenter ruling, the traditional dividing line between public and private information — the release of the information into the stream of commerce — is no longer valid.

Unfortunately, this decision threatens to derail countless police and grand jury investigations, and even throws into doubt the power of courts to issue some subpoenas. Equally disconcerting is that the decision fails to make any serious effort to account for society’s law enforcement needs, critical to any Fourth Amendment analysis.

While prosecutors don’t hesitate to obtain warrants when feasible, cell site data play a pivotal role in an investigation’s early stages, winnowing out the unorganized mass of information that surrounds a crime and helping distinguish the guilty from the innocent.

One can only hope that, for the sake of effective law enforcement, the dissenters’ concerns will also inform the reach of Friday’s decision.