The Supreme Court on Wednesday officially ruled that phones in the United States are \u201cgenerally protected from searches without warrant,\u201d which means law enforcement should now need a warrant before they try to open your phone and use its contents as evidence against you.<\/p>\n
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The suit,\u00a0Riley v. California<\/em>\u00a0was brought to the Supreme Court after a man named David Riley was pulled over in California for a traffic violation. Police took a cell phone from Riley during a search, noticed that Riley was using \u201ca term associated with a street gang,\u201d and then handed the phone over to a detective. After the detective went through the phone, Riley was arrested in connection with a shooting \u2013 all of this stemming from a traffic violation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe data a user views on many modern cell phones may not in fact be stored on the device itself,\u201d the Supreme Court said. \u201cTreating a cell phone as a container whose contents may be searched incident to an arrest is a bit strained as an initial matter.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another way the Supreme Court considered searching cell phones:<\/p>\n The United States concedes that the search incident to arrest exception may not be stretched to cover a search of files accessed remotely-that is, a search of files stored in the cloud. Such a search would be like finding a key in a suspect\u2019s pocket and arguing that it allowed law enforcement to unlock and search a house. Officers searching a phone\u2019s data would not typically know whether the information they are viewing was stored locally at the time of the arrest or has been pulled from the cloud.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That doesn\u2019t mean that police officers can\u2019t inspect your data, however. \u201cOur holding, of course, is not that the information on a cell phone is immune from search; it is instead that a warrant is generally required before such a search, even when a cell phone is seized incident to arrest,\u201d the Supreme Court said.<\/p>\n