Justices May Impose New Limits On Government Access To Cellphone Da
A woman checks her cellphone as she waits in line to enter the Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear arguments in Carpenter v. United States about the government's access to cellphone data.
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In the political world, conservatives often accuse liberals of being soft on crime. At the U.S. court, that's not how it goes. Case in point, at the high court on Wednesday, a majority of the justices across ideological lines indicated they may be willing to impose new limits on the government's ability to gain access to large amounts of information retained by private companies in the digital age.
The question before the court in Carpenter v. United States is whether police have to get a search warrant to obtain cellphone tracking information that is routinely kept by wireless providers.
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Supreme Court Hears Case On Cellphone Location Information
The case arose out of a series of armed robberies in 2010 and 2011 — robberies, ironically, aimed at stealing hundreds of new cellphones and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars. When police apprehended some members of the ring, the smaller fish implicated the leader of the ring, Timothy Carpenter, whereupon the police got a court order to get access to 127 days of cellphone tracking records for Carpenter and other members of the gang. Lo and behold, Carpenter's general location information matched the robbery locations, and that information was used to help convict him.
Prosecutors did get a court order before gaining access to the information, but they only had to show that they were seeking evidence relevant to a criminal investigation. Getting a search warrant is harder and requires more specific information.
New technology clashes with decades-old doctrine
Inside the Supreme Court chamber, the justices seemed torn about whether to break with the so-called third party doctrine. Adopted decades ago, that doctrine says that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when an individual shares information with a third party — for example, the phone company, which knows what telephone numbers the individual calls and receives. Therefore, police do not have to get a search warrant to gain access to those numbers.
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