With the proliferation of smartphones and other electronic devices, courts have struggled to apply old Fourth Amendment principles to modern technologies and the digital data they hold. Now, by and large, that struggle is over. The change came through an unexpected vehicle: Riley v. California. Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided in a surprising 9-0 decision that police officers must now obtain a warrant before searching the digital information on the cell phone of an arrestee. The court’s ruling in Riley signals an important shift in the notion of privacy as it relates to digital information.
Riley v. California—The Facts
Upon being arrested for carrying a concealed and loaded weapon, David Riley was searched and had his smartphone seized by police. The officers then conducted a search of Riley’s cellphone, and found photographs linking Riley to a gang. The state charged Riley in connection with a shooting that occurred a few weeks earlier and used a photograph found on his cellphone as part of an effort to have him sentenced under a gang enhancement. Riley’s motion to suppress all evidence obtained from his cellphone was denied and he was convicted. The California Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court ruling. The California Supreme Court denied Riley’s petition for Review and the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari.
What the Court Said
The Court’s reasoning in Riley rests in large part on the recognition that there is an inherent difference between searching physical objects and searching electronic storage devices like cell phones. As the Chief Justice acknowledged, “Cell phones differ in both a qualitative and quantitative sense from other objects that might be carried on an arrestee’s person.”
The Court offered three principle reasons to explain why a search of the digital data contained on cell phones substantially elevates the privacy interests at stake. First, the Court noted that many cell phones have massive storage capacity that allow consumers to store “millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures, or hundreds of videos.” Then the Court explained that cell phones contain several distinct types of information that, taken together, reveal an intimate picture of an individual that would not otherwise be apparent from an isolated record. Lastly, the Court noted that data contained on a cell phone could date back many years. In sum, the Court reasoned that the richness of digital data that cell phones contain render a warrantless search of such devices unreasonable.
What It All Means
Under the Fourth Amendment, warrantless searches are unreasonable unless a specific exception applies, and, until yesterday, police officers relied on the search-incident-to-arrest (SIA) exception to search the cell phones of arrestees without first obtaining a warrant. The SIA exception allows police officers to search and seize evidence on the person of an arrestee and in the arrestee’s immediate grab area without a warrant. The Riley decision not only departs from the lawful application of the SIA exception to cell phone searches, but also affirms the reasonableness of citizens’ expectation of privacy in their digital data.
Significantly, though the facts of Riley concern the warrantless search of a cell phone, the Court’s opinion doesn’t seem to limit the warrant requirement to cell phones. In fact, Chief Justice Roberts explains in the opinion that “cell phone[s]...are in fact minicomputers.” This ruling will almost certainly be applied to other electronic devices such as tablets and laptop computers. There may also be the potential for this ruling to extend its privacy protection beyond the digital information stored on electronic devices to digital information generally.
Most, if not all, of the differences cited by the Court about the data that cell phones contain applies to digital information that exists in other environments, like web-based emails, which can be just as vulnerable to “search” by the government. Just as privacy advocates have called for updates to Fourth Amendment doctrine recognizing the privacy interest in cell phone data – and this decision surely pleases them – there has also been a call to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) with stronger privacy protections for email and other electronic communications, and it’s fair to wonder whether this decision indicates advocates will be even happier in the future.
The recent uptick in momentum for ECPA reform makes the Supreme Court’s decision in Riley even more apropos. While it remains to be seen what effect, if any, the Riley decision will have on ECPA reform efforts, it is clear that citizens do have a reasonable privacy interest in their digital data, which warrants the full protection of the Fourth Amendment.