Rand Paul to SCOTUS: ‘The Founding Fathers Would Have Protected Your Smartphone’

On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a
pair of cases asking whether the Fourth Amendment requires the
police to get a warrant before searching the cellphones of people
they’ve placed under arrest. As I noted in a recent
column, the Obama administration has come down squarely on the
side of the police in those cases, arguing, “Although cell phones
can contain a great deal of personal information, so can many other
items that officers have long had authority to search, and the
search of a cell phone is no more intrusive than other actions that
the police may take once a person has been lawfully arrested.”

In
the latest issue of Politico Magazine, Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Ky.) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.)
take the opposite view, urging the Supreme Court to rule
against the police and in favor of broad Fourth Amendment
protections:

Today, many Americans keep their entire lives on their phones:
family photos, emails, calendar appointments, Internet searches and
even location history. Considered separately, each of these
categories can reveal very private information. Taken together,
they can present a pretty good picture of who you are, what you do,
where you go, what you read and what you write. What protection
does the Constitution offer them from suspicionless search by the
government?…

Technology will continue to evolve, but our Constitution
endures. We took an oath to uphold the Constitution. So did every
member of the U.S. Supreme Court. The government says that it has
the authority to search phones without a warrant.

As a matter of text and history, however, the Fourth Amendment
says that they do not. We hope the Supreme Court agrees.

For more on the Fourth Amendment issues at stake in the
cellphone cases Riley v. California and U.S. v.
Wurie, see
here.