14 DAY TRIAL // The Supreme Court of the United States is going to have to put down some rules regarding police searches of cellphones without warrants, something that is seen as a violation of privacy in the digital age.
The case (Riley vs. California) will be reviewed by the Justices of the Supreme Court this Tuesday and it comes as a drug dealer and a gang member want the court to decide whether searches of cellphones after their arrest violates their right to privacy in the digital age.
The issue here is that regardless of who an individual is or what he or she is being accused or suspected of, the police should get a warrant in order to search their cellphones.
The Obama administration and the state of California are defending the searches and keep saying that cellphones are no different from anything else that a person may be carrying when arrested. The police can therefore search them without a warrant, basing this on court cases going back as far as 40 years.
Of course, back in the day, arrested individuals weren’t carrying smartphones that contained information about their entire lives, complete with saved email passwords, social media logins and anything else that we all store on the small computers that fit into our pockets.
Putting this case into the context of recent revelations regarding the National Security Agency’s efforts to collect, store and analyze all phone call metadata indicates a desire to obtain complete control over the population’s communications under the umbrella excuse of cellphones being used in the commission of crimes.
Civil liberties groups, defense lawyers and the general population have already reacted to the efforts coming from the Obama Administration.
“Cellphones and other portable electronic devices are, in effect, our new homes,” reads a court filing signed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Basically, the organization says that cellphones nowadays contain the same information that could be found hidden inside their homes until a few years ago.
Therefore, the police shouldn’t be allowed to search anyone’s phones in this day and age until they’ve obtained a search warrant.
So why is the police making such a big case about getting a warrant when in arrest cases that really shouldn’t take very long? The answer falls in line with several other steps taken by the Obama administration in recent months to obtain control over everything related to the digital world.
NSA mass surveillance aside, the US government has just granted itself the right to demand online records even if they are stored in overseas data centers with the excuse of cutting down on the time spent by the police to investigate a case.
The essence of that ruling was, just as in this case, to show that the police can do anything – it can demand data from anywhere in the world, even without jurisdiction, and it can legally violate anyone’s privacy just for the sake of cutting down a few days from the time usually required by authorities to make a case. The goal is to obtain total control over data in a world where privacy, especially online, only exists in theory.