USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: Data ruling strikes a welcome blow against Big Brother
As cellphones have turned into minicomputers that track your location and store intimate details of your life, laws and court rulings protecting individual privacy from government intrusion under the Fourth Amendment have quickly become antiquated.
Fortunately, in recent years the Supreme Court has taken steps to interpret the Constitution’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” to fit the modern world.
In 2012, the court restricted the government’s use of GPS devices to track a vehicle. In 2014, it found police cannot search cellphones without a warrant.
And, on Friday, the high court struck another blow against Big Brother, nudging the constitutional right to privacy one more step into the digital age.
In a 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled that law enforcement cannot track people’s whereabouts over long periods through their cellphones, unless police get a warrant.
The case involved Timothy Carpenter, convicted in a series of armed robberies that occurred in 2010 and 2011. The government prosecuted him based in part on cellphone records from his provider revealing what cell towers he had pinged over 127 days, placing him near the crime scenes.
Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s sanctioned government collection of records without warrants when people allowed third parties, such as banks or telephone companies, to have them. By doing so, customers voluntarily give up their right to privacy for those records.
That’s what the Justice Department argued: Collection of location data was lawful under those precedents.
The court majority — Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices — did not see it that way. Four decades ago when this “third-party” doctrine was fashioned, such records were far less revealing. No one imagined millions of Americans carrying a small device that could track their every movement.
Now location data — gathered automatically with no say-so from cellphone owners — provide 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,’ ” Roberts wrote.
Three of the four dissenters worried that this “new and uncharted course will inhibit law enforcement.” Whether it will or not, the Fourth Amendment protects against searches without a demonstration of probable cause.
The justices were careful to narrow the ruling, not precluding data collection through security cameras, or even location data when it involves national security or emergencies.
But collecting a road map of a person’s whereabouts over 127 days without a warrant? That goes too far in a country where such data are available on nearly everyone carrying one of the nation’s 400 million cellular devices.
Until Congress tackles these vital privacy issues, Americans with cellphones can be thankful that the Supreme Court is ensuring that the Founders’ protections against unreasonable government intrusion still apply.