by Jessica Corbett, The Anti Media:

“The government can no longer claim that just using technology like your cellphones means you’ve given up your Fourth Amendment rights,” says the ACLU. “This is huge.” 

(CD) — In a decision that digital rights advocates called “a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that police generally must obtain a warrant before collecting cellphone records that can be used to track a person’s movements.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represented the petitioner, predicted the “historic” win “will have a ripple effect for privacy,” particularly as it applies to data held by third parties. As the group explained in a series of tweets, “It will help protect all sorts of digital information stored online, from emails to data from smart home appliances.”

Starting now, the government can no longer claim that just using technology like your cellphones means you've given up your Fourth Amendment rights. This is huge. #GetAWarrant pic.twitter.com/iIXvODUKpX

— ACLU (@ACLU) 22 June 2018

Nate Freed Wessler, the ACLU staff attorney who argued the case, discussed the ruling and what it could mean for future cases in a short video posted on Twitter:

ACLU attorney @NateWessler explains what today's major Supreme Court victory on cellphone location tracking means for your privacy rights. pic.twitter.com/S1i9H0Fuk7

— ACLU (@ACLU) 22 June 2018

Famed government whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted the decision was a “victory for ACLU—and America.”

The Supreme Court just ruled the government's decades-old practice of warrantlessly tracking your historical movements via cellphone records (CSLI) has in many cases violated the constitutional right to privacy. Major victory for @ACLU ― and America. #GetAWarrant #Carpenter pic.twitter.com/lqm4joMysm

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) 22 June 2018

Chief Justice John Roberts—joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—wrote the majority opinion (pdf), which explained: “Cellphones perform their wide and growing variety of functions by continuously connecting to a set of radio antennas called ‘cell sites.’ Each time a phone connects to a cell site, it generates a time-stamped record known as cell-site location information (CSLI). Wireless carriers collect and store this information.”

The case in question involved Timothy Carpenter, who was sentenced to serve more than 100 years in prison for multiple robberies in Michigan and Ohio. With a court order that has a lower standard than a warrant, investigators obtained more than four months of location records from Carpenter’s cellphone company, and used that information to build a case against him.

Considering that CSLI data “is detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled,” and that “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements,” the court determined that “the government will generally need a warrant to access CSLI” to comply with the Fourth Amendment.

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