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SCOTUS Strikes Down Warrantless Phone Searches; Tips Hat to Total Surveillance

By Giny Stoner | nworeporter.com

Image by Ginny Stoner | nworeporter.com

Privacy took a leap and plunge on the last day before summer vacation for the Supreme Court of the United States, as SCOTUS issued dueling decisions on important constitutional privacy rights. 

In a ruling being hailed as a victory for privacy advocates, SCOTUS reaffirmed in Smiley v. California that arresting officers must first obtain a warrant before poking through cell phone data.

"The Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to be free from unreasonable searches of their phone data without a properly rubber-stamped search warrant," SCOTUS ruled. "While we recognize this may result in a 5 to 10 minute inconvenience for arresting officers, a warrant remains a crucial component of constitutionally protected privacy rights."
 
In a separate ruling demonstrating the impressive agility of the justices' reasoning skills, SCOTUS decided in favor of total government surveillance in People v. N.S.A., finding that no warrant is required for the inspection, permanent storage or algorithm analysis of surveillance data routinely gathered from all citizens without a warrant.  This includes but is not limited to phone recordings, call logs, texts, emails, Facebook and Twitter posts, calendars, address books, electronic documents, photographs and location data.    
 
"We are confident, based on the testimony of authorities with secret insider information, that total global surveillance is necessary to keep citizens safe from ever-present terrorist threats, both internal and external," the justices ruled. "While it does appear that all actual terrorist attacks since the 1980's have been facilitated by those same authorities, we are satisfied that the clear purpose of doing so was to protect us from even scarier terrorist threats coming down the road." 

The high justices further explained that "we are simply not in a position to question the wisdom of the federal agencies and private contractors charged with ensuring our safety -- particularly when they have all our private data, and the data of our families and friends as well." 

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