In addition to its decision in the landmark Aereo case, the Supreme Court also handed down a ruling in two cases that involved police searching the cellphones of alleged criminals. In a unanimous decision, the justices said that except in unusual circumstances, the information on a suspect's cellphone remains private and police have to get a warrant in order to access it. In effect, the judges said that a mobile device is subject to the same privacy protections as a person's home.
The cases in question involved an alleged Boston crack dealer and a gang member from Los Angeles, and in both of these incidents the police used information they recovered from the suspect's cellphone to connect them to criminal activity. In the California case, it was photos from the individual's phone that tied him to a shooting by the Bloods gang, and in the Massachusetts case the police found a call log with cellphone numbers that tied him to a crime involving crack cocaine.
In their decision, the Supreme Court justices admitted that their ruling might make police work more difficult, but said that the right of privacy extends to the information that we carry with us on our mobile devices:
"Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans 'the privacies of life,' (Boyd, supra, at 630). 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. 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."
More to come
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / BernardaSV