Image: Ophelia Noor/Flickr
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The Wurie case is particularly fascinating because it hinged on a flip phone, and privacy advocates had previously been concerned that Supreme Court would rule on the case while ignoring the much larger privacy concern inherent to smartphones. (For more on each case, as well as the stakes at hand, see this story from January.)Those concerns were assuaged today in a surprisingly firm opinion from Chief Justice Roberts, to which all eight fellow justices concurred. (Justice Alito "filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.") Importantly, the justices made a distinction beyond that of a simple flip phone, and expounded on the massive hoard of personal data that smartphones shuttle around."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."
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While the court did note that exigent circumstances could exist—such as an officer seeing a text about an immediate danger somewhere—the court wrote that such cases should be dealt with individually.In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts was staunch in his defense of the Fourth Amendment, writing broadly that digital data has much larger, inherent privacy concerns than other objects we can carry on our person, and as such deserve heavier protection."The fact that an arrestee has diminished privacy interests does not mean that the Fourth Amendment falls out of the picture entirely," he wrote. "Not every search 'is acceptable solely because a person is in custody.'”Privacy advocates are cheering the decision, which is already being hailed as a forward-thinking and surprisingly strong ruling—at least in light of other recent cases—in defense of privacy."A decade ago officers might have occasionally stumbled across a highly personal item such as a diary, but today many of the more than 90% of American adults who own cell phones keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives."
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