Supreme Court Announces Major Victory for Cellphone Privacy

In a
sweeping opinion handed down today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement officials to
obtain a warrant before searching the cellphones of individuals
they have placed under arrest.

“Modern cell phones are not just another technological
convenience,” declared the majority opinion of Chief Justice John
Roberts in Riley v. California. “With all they contain and
all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of
life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry
such information in his hand does not make the information any less
worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

In his 28-page opinion, Roberts demolished the pro-law
enforcement arguments put forward by the Obama administration and
the state of California, both of which advocated in favor of
allowing the police to conduct warrantless cellphone searches
incident to arrest. Not only are such warrantless searches
unnecessary to officer safety, Roberts observed, they are
unnecessary to help secure the preservation of evidence. The
government’s position, he declared, is “flawed and contravenes our
general preference to provide clear guidance to law enforcement
through categorical rules.”

In closing, the chief justice of the United States offered a
striking affirmation of the Fourth Amendment’s role in American
life: “Our answer to the question of what police must do before
searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly
simple—get a warrant.”

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Riley v. California is
available here.