The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of privacy-based concerns on Friday, states that a warrant is required to get cell phone tower location data from carriers. The 5-4 ruling was in a case called Carpenter v. United States, and is thought to be a core ruling that could have sweeping repercussions for decades to come.
The ruling was a somewhat unusual coalition of Justices, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts being joined by the liberal wing of the court, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. The remaining four Justices each wrote separate dissenting opinions.
The ruling, authored by Chief Justice Roberts and signed onto in full by the other four justices backing the opinion, stated in part, “We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information.”
It went on to state that cell tower location data, “achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” and that, “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.”
Exceptions were created for for pursuing fleeing suspects, bomb threats, child abductions, and other more significant emergencies.
In short, the ruling requires that the government must obtain a warrant before accessing your data, bypassing a general method of gathering all possible data from a cell tower and looking for wrongdoing from there that could be practiced by law enforcement. Law enforcement representatives could still access cell phone tower location data, but only after applying to a judge for a warrant first.
Via The Mac Observer