The Supreme Court seems a bit nervous about letting the police track you with your phone |
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The Supreme Court seems a bit nervous about letting the police track you with your phone
The justices were concerned that the Trump administration is asking for too much in a major police surveillance case.
If I’d only listened to the first half of the Supreme Court’s Monday argument in Chatrie v. United States, a case asking when police can use cellphone data to determine who was present near the site of a crime, I would be convinced that the Court is about to drastically limit Americans’ right to privacy.
Most of the justices’ questions to Adam Unikowsky, the lawyer for a criminal defendant who was convicted of robbing a bank, appeared skeptical of Unikowsky’s claims that the Constitution places strict limits on the government’s ability to track people through their cellphones. Some of the justices even appeared likely to neutralize Carpenter v. United States (2018), a landmark case suggesting that police must obtain a warrant before they obtain cell phone data revealing where a person has been in the past.
Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.
But in the second half of the argument, after Justice Department lawyer Eric Feigin took the podium, most of the justices appeared even more concerned about some of the implications of Feigin’s arguments.
As Chief Justice John Roberts noted shortly after Feigin began his argument, if the government has too much ability to track people using their cellphones, it could potentially learn the identity of everyone who attended a particular religious service, or everyone who attended a particular political meeting. Meanwhile, several other justices appeared worried that the government lawyer’s arguments would permit police to comb through many people’s emails, or their personal calendar and photos, without first obtaining a warrant.
In light of these concerns raised by the justices, it appears likely that the Court will hand down a cautious decision in Chatrie — one that reads Carpenter to require police to always obtain a warrant before they attempt to track someone using their cellphone. That said, the police in Chatrie did, in fact,........