US Supreme Court upholds Right of Privacy 2018
SUPREME
COURT OF THE UNITED STATES No. 16–402
TIMOTHY IVORY CARPENTER,
PETITIONER v. UNITED STATES ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT [June 22, 2018] CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS delivered
the opinion of the Court.
IMPORTANT PARTS OF THE JUDGEMENT
This case presents the question whether the Government
conducts a search under the Fourth Amendment when it accesses historical cell
phone records that provide a comprehensive chronicle of the user’s past
movements.
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to
be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures.” The “basic purpose of this Amendment,” our cases have
recognized, “is to safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against
arbitrary invasions by governmental officials.” Camara v. Municipal Court of
City and County of San Francisco, 387 U. S. 523, 528 (1967). The Founding
generation crafted the Fourth Amendment as a “response to the reviled ‘general
warrants’ and ‘writs of assistance’ of the colonial era, which allowed British
officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of
criminal activity.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S. ___, ___ (2014) (slip op.,
at 27)
We have kept this attention to Founding-era understandings
in mind when applying the Fourth Amendment to innovations in surveillance
tools. As technology has enhanced the Government’s capacity to encroach upon
areas normally guarded from inquisitive eyes, this Court has sought to “assure[
] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when
the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27, 34
(2001). For that reason, we rejected in Kyllo a “mechanical interpretation” of
the Fourth Amendment and held that use of a thermal imager to detect heat
radiating from the side of the defendant’s home was a search. Id., at 35.
Because any other conclusion would leave homeowners “at the mercy of advancing
technology,” we determined that the Government—absent a warrant—could not
capitalize on such new sense-enhancing technology to explorewhat was happening
within the home. Ibid. Likewise in Riley, the Court recognized the “immense
storage capacity” of modern cell phones in holding that police officers must
generally obtain a warrant before searching the contents of a phone. 573 U. S.,
at ___ (slip op., at 17). We explained that while the general rule allowing
warrantless searches incident to arrest “strikes the appropriate balance in the
context of physical objects, neither of its rationales has much force with
respect to” the vast store of sensitive information on a cell phone. Id., at
___ (slip op., at 9).
The case before us involves the Government’s acquisition of
wireless carrier cell-site records revealing the location of Carpenter’s cell
phone whenever it made or received calls. This sort of digital data—personal
location information maintained by a third party—does not fit neatly under
existing precedents. Instead, requests for cell-site records lie at the
intersection of two lines of cases, both of which inform our understanding of
the privacy interests at stake
A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection
by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to
preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be
constitutionally protected.” Katz, 389 U. S., at 351–352. A majority of this
Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of
privacy in the whole of their physical movements. Jones, 565 U. S., at 430
(ALITO, J., concurring in judgment); id., at 415 (SOTOMAYOR, J., concurring).
Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a
brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and
costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” Id., at 429 (opinion of ALITO, J.).
For that reason, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents
and others would not— and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly
monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very
long period.” Id., at 430. Allowing government access to cell-site records
contravenes that expectation. Although such records are generated for
commercial purposes, that distinction does not negate Carpenter’s anticipation
of privacy in his physical location. Mapping a cell phone’s location over the
course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s
whereabouts. As with GPS information, the timestamped data provides an intimate
window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but
through them his “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual
associations.” Id., at 415 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). These location records
“hold for many Americans the ‘privacies of life.’” Riley, 573 U. S., at ___
(slip op., at 28) (quoting Boyd, 116 U. S., at 630). And like GPS monitoring,
cell phone tracking is remarkably easy, cheap, and efficient compared to
traditional investigative tools. With just the click of a button, the
Government canaccess each carrier’s deep repository of historical location
information at practically no expense. In fact, historical cell-site records
present even greater privacy concerns than the GPS monitoring of a vehicle we
considered in Jones. Unlike the bugged container in Knotts or the car in Jones,
a cell phone—almost a “feature of human anatomy,” Riley, 573 U. S., at ___
(slip op., at 9)—tracks nearly exactly the movements of its owner. While
individuals regularly leave their vehicles, they compulsively carry cell phones
with them all the time. A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public
thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters,
and other potentially revealing locales. See id., at ___ (slip op., at 19)
(noting that “nearly three-quarters of smart phone users report being within
five feet of their phones most of the time, with 12% admitting that they even
use their phones in the shower”); contrast Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U. S. 583,
590 (1974) (plurality opinion) (“A car has little capacity for escaping public
scrutiny.”). Accordingly, when the Government tracks the location of a cell
phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle
monitor to the phone’s user. Moreover, the retrospective quality of the data
here gives police access to a category of information otherwise unknowable. In
the past, attempts to reconstruct a person’s movements were limited by a dearth
of records and the frailties of recollection. With access to CSLI, the
Government can now travel back in time to retrace a person’s whereabouts,
subject only to the retention polices of the wireless carriers, which currently
maintain records for up to five years. Critically, because location information
is continually logged for all of the 400 million devices in the United
States—not just those belonging to persons who might happen to come under
investigation— this newfound tracking capacity runs against everyone.
As Justice Brandeis
explained in his famous dissent, the Court is obligated—as “[s]ubtler and more
far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the
Government”—to ensure that the “progress of science” does not erode Fourth
Amendment protections. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 473–474
(1928). Here the progress of science has afforded law enforcement a powerful
new tool to carry out its important responsibilities. At the same time, this
tool risks Government encroachment of the sort the Framers, “after consulting
the lessons of history,” drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. Di Re, 332 U.
S., at 595. We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless
carrier’s database of physical location information. In light of the deeply
revealing nature of CSLI, its depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach, and the
inescapable and automatic nature of its collection, the fact that such
information is gathered by a third party does not make it any less deserving of
Fourth Amendment protection. The Government’s acquisition of the cell-site
records here was a search under that Amendment.