Supreme Court To Decide If the Fourth Amendment Applies to Police Searches of Smart Phones

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution states: 

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause….

So are smart phones packed with telephone numbers, addresses,
photos, texts, videos, and Internet Search logs analogous of papers
and effects? On Friday, the U.S.
Supreme Court agreed to hear appeals from two cases – Riley v.
California and
U.S. v. Wurie – in which police seized and searched
cell phones and used evidence found on them to convict their owners
of crimes.

In California, David Leon Riley was convicted of shooting at an
occupied vehicle, attempted murder, and assault based on
circumstantial evidence in his phone that suggested that he was a
gang member. The appeals courts in California upheld his
conviction. In Massachusetts, police searched the numbers stored in
Brima Wurie’s phone to find his house address where they then
proceeded to conduct a search that uncovered a stash of illegal
drugs and gun. The appeals court in this case overturned Wurie’s
conviction and decided that the police must obtain a warrant before
searching a cell phone.

The courts have generally ruled that police
may search people whom they have arrested with the general
goals of making sure that the arrestees do not have weapons that
could harm the police and protecting evidence from destruction. The
lawyers in the Riley case argue in their
Supreme Court petition argue:

Contrary to the California Supreme Court’s view, the Fourth
Amendment forbids police officers from searching cell phones
incident to arrest for two reasons. First, once a cell phone is
securely in police control, neither of the reasons identified in
Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969), [i.e., weapons or
destructible evidence] for conducting searches incident to arrest
justifies searching the phone’s digital contents. Second, the
profound privacy concerns attendant to cell phones make it
unreasonable for police officers to search digital content without
a warrant.

The Obama Administration’s Department of Justice has filed a

brief arguing that the police do not need a warrant to search
the contents of a cell phone. The amicus
brief for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for
Democracy and Technology points out:

Smartphone technology has thus produced an incredible change in
the quantity and type of information that individuals routinely
have in their immediate possession. Previously, no individual could
carry, either on his or her person or in a container, even a small
fraction of the information contained in today’s smartphones. In
physical form—paper documents, photographs, etc. — the information
would be too bulky and too heavy to carry. Because of those
physical limitations, more over, no individual could routinely
carry all of his or her personal financial or medical
information.

Today, it is no exaggeration to state that an individual can,
and often does, carry at all times the extremely personal
information that formerly would have been stored in the
individual’s residence.

Given that we now carry our most private papers and effects on
us at all times, the Supreme Court should clearly recognize that
Fourth Amendment protections apply to the seizure and search of our
cell phones.