On November 29, 2017, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in an important privacy case.
The Sixth Circuit held that the protection granted under the Fourth Amendment did not prevent the government to access business records from the defendants’ wireless carriers revealing the user’s location without a warrant.
In Carpenter v. United States Timothy Carpenter and Timothy Sanders were convicted of nine armed robberies. The government’s evidence at trial included business records from the defendants’ wireless carriers. Defendant argued that government’s collection of those records constituted a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The Sixth Circuit rejected the Forth Amendment argument and affirmed the district Court judgment holding that defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in cell phone business records dealing with routing information rather than the content of the related communications. See here for more information.
According to the report of the oral argument the Supreme Court would seem unsure at this point whether police need to obtain a warrant to search past location data from a suspect’s cellphone. As Justice Stephen Breyer put it at one point, “This is an open box. We know not where we go.”
The decision will be important to determine if the collection of the records is a Fourth Amendment search and, if it is a search, if the search requires a warrant.
Interesting reports of the oral argument are available at http://www.scotusblog.com… or at https://www.theatlantic.com…
For more information, Francesca Giannoni-Crystal
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