https://www.cnet.com/news/supreme-court-says-warrant-necessary-for-phone-location-data/
I know many of you will agree with this decision on the actual issue, but the problem is they had to stand the Fourth Amendment on its head and invent a constitutional right out of whole cloth to get there.
The issue concerns cell phone tracking. Providers have records that record the precise location of your phone at all times. Obviously that is incredibly useful information for the police to have, for example in confirming an alibi. They used it to convict a guy and of course, he appealed. The argument was that accessing this data, which importantly is held by the provider, was the sort of search and seizure that triggered the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. The Sixth Circuit disagreed. Traditionally, the Fourth Amendment only applied to the defendant's own property, not records held by third parties unless some other sort of protection, eg attorney/client, applied.
The Supreme Court disagreed, per Chief Justice Roberts, a man known for occasional flights of inventive writing, see Obamacare decision. There is no point in reading the decision as it doesn't rely on any actual law or precedent, only the philosophizing of the learned Justices. Now apparently the Fourth Amendment might cover all sorts of personal data held by third parties, even though it was provided voluntarily and with no expectation of privacy.
The issue here is not whether such data should be shielded from law enforcement. In other cases, eg medical records, congress enacted specific laws to deal with the issue. Now the Court has arrogated that function to itself. Inevitably, we will have to endure through decades of wasteful lawsuits to define the parameters of this new policy.
I know many of you will agree with this decision on the actual issue, but the problem is they had to stand the Fourth Amendment on its head and invent a constitutional right out of whole cloth to get there.
The issue concerns cell phone tracking. Providers have records that record the precise location of your phone at all times. Obviously that is incredibly useful information for the police to have, for example in confirming an alibi. They used it to convict a guy and of course, he appealed. The argument was that accessing this data, which importantly is held by the provider, was the sort of search and seizure that triggered the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. The Sixth Circuit disagreed. Traditionally, the Fourth Amendment only applied to the defendant's own property, not records held by third parties unless some other sort of protection, eg attorney/client, applied.
The Supreme Court disagreed, per Chief Justice Roberts, a man known for occasional flights of inventive writing, see Obamacare decision. There is no point in reading the decision as it doesn't rely on any actual law or precedent, only the philosophizing of the learned Justices. Now apparently the Fourth Amendment might cover all sorts of personal data held by third parties, even though it was provided voluntarily and with no expectation of privacy.
The issue here is not whether such data should be shielded from law enforcement. In other cases, eg medical records, congress enacted specific laws to deal with the issue. Now the Court has arrogated that function to itself. Inevitably, we will have to endure through decades of wasteful lawsuits to define the parameters of this new policy.
