Justices rule that cellphone location histories are protected by the Fourth Amendment

14 Likes

This is the case it seems. Looked it up because I wanted to see who dissented.

3 Likes

I’m going to bet you were 0% surprised by the dissenters lol.

Overall this is fantastic news and does a lot of what the legislation that Naomi Brockwell and Rep Massie are championing.

3 Likes

Yeah, it was pretty much exactly who I was expecting.

3 Likes

Requires a warrant now — okay, great, but in jurisdictions where judges are hostile to privacy, may not do much. A step in the right direction at least.

3 Likes

Good to see, overall. The Supreme Court’s eclectic nature when it comes to rulings is quite confusing. One week we get something tantamount to “the President can’t be prosecuted for anything, ever”, and another week we get this.

2 Likes

It seems that there is not really a partisan split in the court as traditionally understood. Instead there is a three way ideological split. A liberal block, a traditional conservative block, and a strict originalist block.

The originalist block will sometimes side with the liberals and sometimes with the conservatives. This causing the (from a traditional partisan filter) the eclectic rulings.

2 Likes

That’s a really interesting perspective. Can you define what you mean by “originalist”?

2 Likes

Originalism - Wikipedia to give a more helpful answer.

4 Likes

Here is a link to the actual opinions:

I’ve only skimmed through because it’s 72 pages and I’m supposed to be working. Overall, I like Gorsuch’s concurrence best, which primarily disagrees with previous rulings that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy for documents shared with third parties. He then argues that digital information qualifies as the “papers and effects” portion of the fourth amendment, and that constitutional protections do not diminish with the advancement of technology.

The dissenters argue that cell phone location data was freely and knowingly shared with Google as a third party, so that information is no longer Chatrie’s private data, but is instead a business asset belonging to Google.

3 Likes