The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police generally may not search the cellphones of Americans who have been arrested without a search warrant.
—By Dana Liebelson | Tue Sep. 17, 2013 6:00 AM EDT | Updated Wed Jun. 25, 2014 11:00 AM EDT
Bruce Bortin/Flickr
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police generally may not search the cellphones of Americans who have been arrested without a search warrant. (You can read the decision here; it’s also posted below.) In a sweeping win for digital privacy rights, the justices recognized that cellphones contain “vast quantities of personal information” and are fundamentally different than other items that a person might have on his or her body when arrested.
“Before cellphones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and generally constituted only a narrow intrusion on privacy. But cellphones can store millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures or hundreds of videos. This has several interrelated privacy consequences,” reads the opinion, which reverses the decision of the California appellate court in Riley v. California.
The justices concluded that officers may examine the phone’s physical aspects to ensure that it will not be used as a weapon, but may not comb through the data without a warrant. “It is true that this decision will have some impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime. But the Court’s holding is not that the information on a cellphone is immune from search; it is that a warrant is generally required before a search.”