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On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in a five-to-four decision that law enforcement generally must obtain a warrant to gather cellphone location data from network providers. In an age where virtually everyone is carrying a location-tracking device, the decision is a huge win for privacy advocates.

The case of Carpenter v. United States was expected to set new standards for the application of the Third Party Doctrine, a precedent set in the ‘70s and ‘80s that maintains a suspect gives up their expectation of privacy if they share information with a third party. When it comes to the location data an individual shares with a telecom, the ACLU argued that police should have to go through the usual standards of demonstrating probable cause when getting a warrant to collect location data. Nathaniel Wessler, a staff attorney for the ACLU, told Gizmodo last November, “The court four decades ago could not possibly have imagined the world we live in today, where it’s really impossible to go through our daily lives without records of our most private activities being saved on the servers of companies we have relationships with.”

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Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion in which he insisted today’s decision is narrow. “We hold only that a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party,” he wrote. Roberts specifically said the ruling does not weigh-in on the legality of real-time cell site location information (CSLI) or “a download of information on all the devices that connected to a particular cell site during a particular.”



All the court is saying today is that in the case of obtaining location records from a cellphone company, police will need to demonstrate probable cause. Previously, the Stored Communications Act set the precedent that law enforcement need only go to court and demonstrate “specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe” what could be found in the records might be relevant and material to a criminal investigation. Probable cause carries more strict and codified standards in its application. The court did give the exception that a warrant does not necessarily have to be obtained in cases in which there could be an immediate threat or danger to life.

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The case began with a man named Timothy Ivory Carpenter who was sentenced to 116 years in prison for his role in a string of robberies at various RadioShack stores in Michigan and Ohio. Police had witnesses and surveillance footage placing Carpenter at the locations at which the robberies took place, but they also used 186 pages of documents obtained from cell carrier that outlined his call history and location data. The records comprised data over the course of 127 days and included unrelated information about Carpenter’s movements including where he slept at night and how often he attended church.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “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.” The Justice worried that “police need not even know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual, or when,” and argued this violated the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections. “Only the few without cell phones could escape this tireless and absolute surveillance,” the Justice said.

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There’s still reason to believe that further debate on the issue will be hashed out in the courts. Roberts’ pronouncement that the court holds only that “a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party,” is vague enough that it could be contentious.

The ACLU appears to be more than pleased with the ruling. In a press release it quoted Harold Gurewitz, an attorney who worked alongside the civil liberties organization on the Carpenter case, as saying, “The court’s decision is a vindication of the arguments we have persistently made on behalf of Timothy Carpenter throughout this litigation — that the Constitution’s privacy protections fully apply to the digital location data created by using cell phones.”

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[Supreme Court of the United States]</s>In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the government generally does need to obtain a warrant before collecting location data from cell phones.

The case, Carpenter v. United States, posed a question that has come up time and again – do police need a warrant based on probable cause before accessing cell phone location records from wireless carriers? The Supreme Court said yes, but stressed that its decision is narrow.

"We hold only that a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, according to The New York Times.

Privacy advocates are now celebrating what they're calling a landmark victory.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represented Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted of robbery in Detroit, based in part on months' worth of phone location records the government obtained in 2011 without a probable cause warrant. The records covered 127 days, revealing 12,898 separate points of location data.

The ACLU argued that because cell phone location records offer a wealth of private details about people's lives — such as their personal relationships, visits to the doctor, or religious practices — they should be covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against "unreasonable" searches and seizures by law enforcement.

Tech giants including Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Verizon in August filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that the Fourth Amendment "must adapt to the changing realities of the digital era."

The decision comes after the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, ruled in 2016 that law-enforcement officials do not need to obtain a warrant before tracking a person's location via wireless carriers. The court found that location data is already delivered to a third party—in this case, the carriers—and therefore doesn't require a warrant if data is readily accessible.</s>INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. - Law enforcement in Indiana, and across the country, will now generally need a warrant to track cell phone location data after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling Friday dealing with privacy rights in the digital age.

The justice's 5-4 decision in the case of Carpenter v. United States changes how the government may gain access to the information phone companies collect from cellphone towers helping to reveal a user's location, finding accessing that information is a search under the Fourth Amendment.

"With this new Supreme Court ruling we will simply change the way that we do it," Indiana State Police Sgt. John Perrine said.

Cell phone data is often used by investigators in criminal cases. The justices ruled probable cause will be needed to obtain a warrant signed off on by a judge to track cell site location information, though certain circumstances may support a warrant less search.

"I don't think it's a setback for law enforcement if anything it gives us a clearly defined rules on how we have to go about obtaining warrants to search phone records," said Jim White, a professor at IUPUI's School of Public and Environmental Affairs and former ISP officer.

In this case, investigators obtained records from cell towers spanning more than 100 days without a search warrant in their case against Timothy Carpenter, who was sentenced for his part in a string of robberies in Michigan and Ohio.

The Supreme Court has already ruled in the past a warrant is required to search the cell phone of someone police have just arrested.

"There's a big question about who owns data. Is it the person who collects it or is it the person that the data is about? And in this case the Supreme Court said essentially that that data is about the individual," said Dom Caristi, a professor of telecommunications at Ball State University.

The American Civil Liberties Union helped represent Carpenter. It wrote in part:

“This is a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights in the digital age,” said ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, who argued the case before the court last November. “The Supreme Court has given privacy law an update that it has badly needed for many years, finally bringing it in line with the realities of modern life. The government can no longer claim that the mere act of using technology eliminates the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Today’s decision rightly recognizes the need to protect the highly sensitive location data from our cell phones, but it also provides a path forward for safeguarding other sensitive digital information in future cases — from our emails, smart home appliances, and technology that is yet to be invented.”

The chief trial deputy in the Marion County Prosecutor's Office, Ryan Mears, said they use cell phones and cell phone data in general in most murder and major felony cases, but doesn't believe the latest ruling will have a huge impact. He believes it may even speed up the process.

"We prefer using the search warrant just because the cell companies are more responsive to a search warrant being served on them as opposed to a subpoena. With a subpoena you have 30 days to respond and with the search warrant they have a tendency to provide that information much quicker," Mears said.

But the way society uses technology is constantly changing and new technologies and social media platforms are constantly evolving.

"So we deal with different issues involving cell phones, cell phone technologies and the law probably needs to catch up to where the technology is," Mears said.

While the way police may obtain some information is changing, their job remains the same, though.

"This doesn't put a stop to the way that we've used it, it just adds an extra step," Sgt. Perrine said.

Perrine said they'll review the ruling to make sure they're in compliance and stay in compliance.</s>The US Supreme Court ruled Friday in favor of privacy advocates by considering that authorities must in most cases obtain a warrant to obtain users' location data from cell-phone companies.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices struck down a lower court's ruling that said the police did not need a warrant to ask a wireless provider to hand over cell phone records in an investigation.</s>The Supreme Court on Friday ruled the government needs a warrant to obtain your personal cell phone location data — a pro-criminal-defendant decision that strengthens Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The court ruled 5-4 that a precedent known as the third-party records doctrine, which says the Fourth Amendment does not apply to information individuals voluntarily share with a third party, is not applicable to personal cell phone location data.

In the decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the court’s four liberal justices, the Supreme Court said cell phone location data “is not truly ‘shared’ as the term is normally understood.”

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “In light of the deeply revealing nature of [personal cell phone location data], 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.”

This was one of the final major decisions the Supreme Court will announce this term. The court, however, has yet to release opinions on major cases involving public-sector unions, racial gerrymandering and President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

The Supreme Court will announce additional decisions beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern on Monday.</s>(Reuters) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday imposed limits on the ability of police to obtain cellphone data pinpointing the past location of criminal suspects in a major victory for digital privacy advocates and a setback for law enforcement authorities.

In the 5-4 ruling, the court said police generally need a court-approved warrant to get access to the data, setting a higher legal hurdle than previously existed under federal law. The court said obtaining such data without a warrant from wireless carriers, as police routinely do, amounted to an unreasonable search and seizure under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

In the ruling written by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, the court decided in favor of Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted in several armed robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores in Ohio and Michigan with the help of past cellphone location data that linked him to the crime scenes.

Roberts stressed that the ruling did not resolve other hot-button digital privacy fights, including whether police need warrants to access real-time cellphone location information to track criminal suspects. The ruling has no bearing on “traditional surveillance techniques” such as security cameras or on data collection for national security purposes, he added.

Roberts was joined by the court’s four liberal justices in the majority. The court’s other four conservatives dissented.

Although the ruling explicitly concerned only historical cellphone data, digital privacy advocates are hopeful it will set the tone for future cases on other emerging legal issues prompted by new technology.

“Today’s decision rightly recognizes the need to protect the highly sensitive location data from our cellphones, but it also provides a path forward for safeguarding other sensitive digital information in future cases — from our emails, smart home appliances and technology that is yet to be invented,” said Nate Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Carpenter.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Roberts said.

Roberts said the ruling still allows police to avoid obtaining warrants for other types of business records. Police could also avoid obtaining warrants in emergency situations, Roberts added.

The high court endorsed the arguments made by Carpenter’s lawyers, who said that police needed “probable cause,” and therefore a warrant, to avoid a Fourth Amendment violation.

Conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a dissenting opinion that the ruling could put “criminal investigations at serious risk in serious cases, often when law enforcement seeks to prevent the threat of violent crimes.”

The case underscored the rising concerns among privacy advocates about the government’s ability to obtain an ever-growing amount of personal data. During arguments in the case in December, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined Roberts in the ruling, alluded to fears of “Big Brother,” the all-seeing leader in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

Friday’s ruling was the third in recent years in which the court has resolved major cases on how criminal law applies to new technology, on each occasion ruling against law enforcement. In 2014, it required police in most instances to obtain a warrant to search a cellphone’s contents when its user is arrested. In 2012, it decided that a warrant is needed to place a GPS tracking device on a vehicle.

Police helped establish that Carpenter was near the scene of the robberies by securing from his cellphone carrier his past “cell site location information” that tracks which cellphone towers relay calls. His bid to suppress the evidence failed and he was convicted of six robbery counts.

Carpenter’s case will now return to lower courts. His conviction may not be overturned because of the other evidence linking him to the crimes.

The U.S. Justice Department had argued that probable cause should not be required to obtain customer records under a 1986 federal law called the Stored Communications Act. Instead, it argued for a lower standard — that prosecutors show only that there are “reasonable grounds” for the records and that they are “relevant and material” to an investigation.

Roberts wrote that the government’s argument “fails to contend with the seismic shifts in digital technology that made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter’s location but also everyone else’s.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment after the ruling.

The decision was issued during a time of rising concern over surveillance practices of law enforcement and intelligence agencies and whether companies like wireless carriers care about customer privacy rights. The big four wireless carriers — Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc, T-Mobile US Inc and Sprint Corp – receive tens of thousands of these requests yearly from law enforcement.</s>The Supreme Court ruled that police generally need a search warrant to review cell phone records that include data like a user's location, which will impose a higher bar for law enforcement to access data collected on the millions of people who use smartphones on a daily basis.The plaintiff in the case, Timothy Carpenter, was convicted of multiple robbery and gun offenses in 2010 but challenged the conviction saying that officers investigating the case didn't get a warrant for his cell phone records. The government argued that law enforcement doesn't need a warrant to get cell phone records from the service provider since it's a third party.The Court ruled that the government's search, in this case, did not meet the bar for probable cause for a warrant because investigators only had to show that argue the cell phone data might be related to an ongoing investigation in order to get access to it from the cell phone provider.Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority decision that the government is obligated to get a warrant before compelling a wireless provider to provide cell phone records in an investigation."We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier's database of physical location information," Roberts said. "In light of the deeply revealing nature of (cell site location information), 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."ABC News Supreme Court contributor and Cardozo law professor Kate Shaw said that the ruling is in line with some of the Court's other efforts to update the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure to keep up with new technology."Here, the Court explains that shifts in technology require revisiting what's known as the "third party doctrine," the idea that if you've knowingly shared information with a third party, you have a reduced expectation of privacy in that information," Shaw said. "The government argued that by "sharing" information about his location with his cell phone company, the defendant had lost any expectation of privacy, but the Court rejects that argument, finding that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy and that a warrant was required to access information about his location derived from cell towers."The Court also specified that the ruling does not apply to searches from cell phone data not directly related to this case, including national security or foreign affairs cases, real-time information, or information on all devices connected to a specific cell phone town during a particular time frame.Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch all dissented to the decision to strike down the lower court's ruling in favor of the government.Kennedy said in a dissent, also signed by Thomas and Alito, that the Court's decision was a "stark departure" from previous Fourth Amendment cases where the Court has ruled that individuals don't have protection from unreasonable search and seizure when it relates to business records owned and controlled by a third party. He called the majority decision "incorrect" and said it "unhinges" the previous doctrine in Fourth Amendment cases and "draws an unprincipled and unworkable line" between cell phone location data and other records used in investigations such as financial or other phone records."The new rule the Court seems to formulate puts needed, reasonable, accepted, lawful, and congressionally authorized criminal investigations at serious risk in serious cases, often when law enforcement seeks to prevent the threat of violent crimes," Kennedy said. "And it places undue restrictions on the lawful and necessary enforcement powers exercised not only by the Federal Government, but also by law enforcement in every State and locality throughout the Nation."The American Civil Liberties Union, which argued for Carpenter in the case, called the decision a "groundbreaking victory for Americans' privacy rights" and will help protect other kinds of digital information.</s>The US Supreme Court has ruled in favor of digital privacy.

In a 5-4 decision on Friday the justices decided that police need warrants to gather phone location data as evidence for 

trials. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Sixth Circuit court's decision.

Carpenter v. United States is the first case about phone location data that the Supreme Court has ruled on. That makes it a landmark decision regarding how law enforcement agencies can use technology as they build cases. The court heard arguments in the case on Nov. 29.

The dispute dates back to a 2011 robbery in Detroit, after which police gathered months of phone location data from Timothy Carpenter's phone provider. They pulled together 12,898 different locations from Carpenter, over 127 days.

The legal and privacy concern was that police gathered the four months' worth of Carpenter's digital footprints without a warrant. A Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals judge ruled that cellphone location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure, and therefore didn't require a warrant.

In the Supreme Court's ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the government's searches of Carpenter's phone records were considered a Fourth Amendment search.

"The Government's position fails to contend with the seismic shifts in digital technology that made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter's location but also everyone else's, not for a short period but for years and years," he wrote.

Roberts pointed out that allowing government access to historical GPS data infringes on Carpenter's Fourth Amendment protections and expectation of privacy, by providing law enforcement with an "all-encompassing record" of his whereabouts. He added that historical GPS data presents an "even greater privacy risk" than real-time GPS monitoring.

Carpenter's attorneys, including lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, argued before the Supreme Court that cellphone location data constitutes sensitive digital records and should be protected under the Fourth Amendment.

"This is a groundbreaking victory for Americans' privacy rights in the digital age," ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, who argued the case, said in a statement. "The Supreme Court has given privacy law an update that it has badly needed for many years, finally bringing it in line with the realities of modern life. The government can no longer claim that the mere act of using technology eliminates the Fourth Amendment's protections."

Phone location data is a hot button issue for privacy advocates. In May, Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, asked phone service providers why they were giving away location data to Securus Technologies, a service that monitors calls to prison inmates, which police could use to track anybody's phone in the US, without a warrant.

The Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation into LocationSmart in May this year, a company that boasted that it could find any phone in the US without needing special permission.

Wyden said Friday's ruling was a "welcome step" for privacy and fighting against the expanding power of government surveillance.

"The court's recognition that digital devices can generate 'near-perfect surveillance' of a person's private life is a validation of the vital protections against unreasonable search and seizure provided by our Constitution," the senator said.

The losing argument was that phone companies can provide customers' data to law enforcement because they own those records, not the person. During the trial, US Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben told the Supreme Court that people agree to hand over their information to providers for their service.

"It is asking a business to provide information about the business' own transactions with a customer," Dreeben said in November.

Before the trial took place, major tech companies, including Apple, Facebook and Google, filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it harder for law enforcement officials to obtain individuals' data without a warrant.

While the decision sets a ruling for historical GPS data, the Supreme Court said it does not apply to security cameras, business records or real-time location tracking.

In a tweet, the ACLU's deputy legal director called the decision a "civil liberties VICTORY."

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, said the decision was a major victory for the US.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association's president Ed Black said the decision would have significant impact on how the Fourth Amendment protects your data from government surveillance.

"This decision will provide users with the confidence that the sensitive location data they share with innovative digital devices and services will only be disclosed to law enforcement with a warrant based on probable cause," he said.

Originally published at 7:21 a.m. PT on June 22.

Updated at 7:38 a.m. PT: To include details from the Supreme Court's decision, at 7:54 a.m. PT: To include a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden, at 8:10 a.m. PT: To add reactions to the decision.

Security: Stay up-to-date on the latest in breaches, hacks, fixes and all those cybersecurity issues that keep you up at night.

CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET's newsstand edition.</s>Gathering location data just became trickier for authorities. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that accessing a suspect's cell phone location history should require a warrant. The decision came at the end of Carpenter v. United States, the first case about location data the Supreme Court has ruled on.

The case in question started with a robbery in 2011, after which Detroit police acquired 127 days' worth of location data from Timothy Carpenter's cell phone provider. The court's decision says authorities' gathering of Carpenter's location history was a violation of his Fourth Amendment right not to be subject to unreasonable searches and seizures. "The Government's position fails to contend with the seismic shifts in digital technology that made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter's location but also everyone else's, not for a short period but for years and years," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

An appeals court had previously ruled that location records are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Authorities argued that location data is owned by the companies that store it, not the individual that created it, and so it was the prerogative of Carpenter's service provider to hand over the records. In the lead-up to the trial, several major tech companies including Google, Apple, and Facebook had written a letter urging the court to make it more difficult for the government to acquire location history.</s>The US Supreme Court has sided with consumers to expand digital privacy rights in a closely watched case revolving around location data. In the 5-4 decision, the court ruled that police must obtain a valid search warrant before obtaining location data on a suspect from cellular carriers. So, you do have some expectation of privacy while using your phone, despite the objections of law enforcement.

The case was brought by Michigan man Timothy Carpenter, who was convicted of a string of robberies at Radio Shack and T-Mobile stores. FBI agents obtained several months of location data from Carpenter’s cellular carrier, thus proving he was in the vicinity of all the robberies. This piece of evidence was key in his conviction, but Carpenter’s lawyers appealed on the grounds that law enforcement didn’t get a warrant for the location data. As a result, they argued that the evidence and conviction should be thrown out.

Lower courts ruled against Carpenter, but the Supreme Court found that law enforcement does need a warrant to access mobile location information. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four left-leaning Justices to secure the privacy win. In his majority opinion, Roberts suggests that cell phones have become almost a “feature of human anatomy.” Your phone goes everywhere that you go, so providing unfettered access to location data from that phone to police is a violation of Fourth Amendment protections. It would be no different than attaching an ankle monitor to the suspect.

The basis for past rulings was a 38-year-old Supreme Court case that found people didn’t have a reasonable expectation that their phone call records would be kept private because they were retained for billing purposes. Could that same logic apply to your location? The Justice Department argued in the case that your location information is not private because your carrier is already collecting it. Network-level location data isn’t as accurate as GPS, but it’s necessary for the carrier to ensure you’re connected to the right tower to place calls and access data.

Lower courts accepted the Justice Department’s rationale, but the Supreme Court has had the final word. Police will now need to obtain a warrant before getting location data from your mobile carrier. The court has also ruled in recent years that police need a warrant to search through your phone or attach a GPS tracking device to your vehicle. If you’re worried about privacy, things are moving in the right direction.
The U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, rules law enforcement are required to obtain a search warrant to gather location data from cell phone companies.