Justices take up case about privacy in digital age

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is taking up a case about privacy rights that could limit the government’s ability to track Americans’ movements in the digital age.

The justices are hearing an appeal Wednesday from Timothy Carpenter. He was sentenced to 116 years in prison after being convicted of robbing electronics stores in Michigan and Ohio. Records from cell phone towers near the stores helped place Carpenter in the vicinity of the crimes.

The big issue is whether police must get a search warrant to look at the records. Rights groups and technology experts are among those who have joined Carpenter in arguing it’s too easy for authorities to use the records to learn intimate details of someone’s life.

The Supreme Court in recent years has acknowledged technology’s effects on Americans’ privacy. In 2014, the court held unanimously that police must generally get a warrant to search the cell phones of people they arrest. Other items people carry with them may be looked at without a warrant, after an arrest.

In Carpenter’s case, authorities obtained cell phone records for 127 days.

The robberies took place at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in 2010 and 2011. Carpenter organized most of the robberies, in which he signaled the others in his group to enter the stores with their guns drawn, according to the government’s Supreme Court brief. Customers and employees were herded to the back and the robbers filled their bags with new smartphones. They got rid of the guns and sold the phones, the government said.

Police learned of Carpenter’s involvement after a confession by another person involved in the holdups. They got an order for cell phone tower data for Carpenter’s phone, which shows which towers a phone has connected with when used in a call. The records help approximate someone’s location.

Investigators were able to get a judge to sign an order for the records, but they had to meet a lower standard of proof than a warrant’s requirement to show probable cause that Carpenter committed a crime.

The judge at Carpenter’s trial refused to suppress the records, and a federal appeals court agreed.