By Police1 Staff
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has adopted new privacy rules for cellphone tracking that marks a significant change in how police can obtain cellphone tower records.
In a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled Friday that police generally need search warrants if they want to track criminal suspects’ movement by collecting information on where they used their cellphones, the Associated Press reports. The court said the 4th Amendment protects cellphone data from being searched without a warrant, even though the records are collected and held by private companies and not the government, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Chief Justice John Roberts said cellphone location information “is detailed, encyclopedic and effortlessly compiled” and that “an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements” as they are captured by cellphone towers.
Roberts added that the court’s decision is limited to cellphone tracking information and doesn’t affect other business records such as those that come from banks. He also said police can obtain cellphone tracking records without a warrant when responding to an emergency “such as an active shooting, a bombing or the abduction of a child.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the court’s decision will “inhibit law enforcement” and “keep defendants and judges guessing for years to come.” Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch also wrote dissenting opinions.
The court ruled in the case of Timothy Carpenter, an alleged leader of an armed robbery gang in the Detroit area. Carpenter was sentenced to 116 years in prison for his role in a string of robberies of Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio.
Authorities tracked Carpenter’s movements for 127 days using data from his cellphones that was obtained without a warrant. Investigators obtained the records with a court order that required a lower standard than the “probable cause” needed to obtain a warrant.
In Carpenter’s trial, the judge found that no warrant was needed to obtain the data and refused to suppress the cellphone records. A federal appeals court also agreed with the judge’s decision before coming to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court relied in part on a 1979 Supreme Court decision that treated phone records different than phone conversations. Authorities generally need a warrant for phone conversations.
“The government’s position fails to contend with the seismic shifts in digital technology that made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s, not for a short period but for years and years,” Roberts wrote.
In the 1979 case, which involved a single home telephone, the court said at the time that people had no expectation of privacy in the records of calls made and kept by the phone company.