Carpenter v. United States is a pending case before the United States Supreme Court and raises the question of whether the government violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution by accessing an individual's historical cellphone locations records without a warrant. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on November 29, 2017. Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, argued on behalf of Carpenter. Michael Dreeben, the Deputy Solicitor General in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice criminal docket before the Supreme Court, argued on behalf of the United States.
The Supreme Court will announce its decision prior to the conclusion of the October 2017 term, which ends in June 2018. The decision is expected to clarify the Fourth Amendment's influence upon the ability of law enforcement agencies to obtain smartphone data collected by third-party communication providers.
Some consider Carpenter to be the most important Fourth Amendment case that the Supreme Court has heard in a generation.
Video Carpenter v. United States
Constitutional background
Cellphones, particularly smartphones, have become an important instrument for nearly every person in the United States. Many applications, such as GPS navigation and location tools, require the cellphone to send and receive information constantly, including the exact location of the cellphone. Third-party service providers collect data for regular business purposes.
The case is expected to decide whether law enforcement agencies may obtain cellphone data from third-party service providers without a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment protects "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures[.]" The government may violate such rights only upon issuance of a warrant. The Fourth Amendment protections include the public's content of their communications; however, federal courts have long recognized that the Fourth Amendment does not protect the public from allowing the government to obtain the information necessary to get communications from point A to point B. For example, the government can obtain from a letter or package without a warrant the sender, receiver, originating and delivery addresses, package size, and weight; however, the government must obtain a warrant before opening the package or letter to obtain its contents.
In 1979, the Supreme Court decided Smith v. Maryland, which determined the rights of the people with regards to phone communications. The Court held in Smith that the government may not eavesdrop on a phone call, even a one placed from a public phone booth; however, the phone numbers the person dialed on his phone could be obtained without a warrant. Smith was a landmark decision by the Court and has guided the federal courts ever since on questions related to privacy and cellphones.
In 1986, the United States Congress passed the Stored Communications Act (codified at 18 USC Chapter 121 §§ 2701-2712), which governs the privacy of stored Internet communications in the United States. Section 2703 (18 USC § 2703) provides the rules that the government must follow to compel a third-party service provider to disclose "customer or subscriber" content and non-content information.
A 2013 study found that over 90% of Americans owned a cellphone. Whenever a cellphone sends or receives data, its service provider stores the information, which includes the time of the data transmission and the location of the cell phone during the transmission. Service providers retain cell-site records in the ordinary course of business for their own purposes, including to find weak spots in their cellular networks and to determine whether to charge customers roaming charges for particular calls.
In 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Riley v. California that the warrantless search and seizure of digital contents of a cellphone during an arrest is unconstitutional. In its decision, the Court recognized that the public's adoption of cellphones, combined with their capacity to hold vast quantities of detailed personal information, makes them vastly different from the old analog phones.
In Carpenter, the government relied upon the Stored Communications Act and Smith v. Maryland to support its position that obtaining the service provider's location information should not require a warrant because the information reveals only a cell phone's routing data, rather than the contents of communications on the cell phone. The attorneys for Carpenter relied on the Fourth Amendment and Riley v. California to argue that cellphones have become intertwined into the lives of American citizens and the vast data contained in them potentially holds the sum of the individual's private life, so the routing data contains much more than the "information necessary to get communications from point A to point B."
Maps Carpenter v. United States
Case
Between December 2010 and March 2011, several individuals in the Detroit, Michigan, area conspired and participated in armed robberies at RadioShack and T-Mobile stores in Michigan and Ohio. When the robbers entered the store, they brandished their guns, ordered customers and employees to the back of the store and told the employees to fill their bags with new smartphones.
In April 2011, four of the robbers were captured and arrested (Carpenter was not among the group of arrestees). One of those arrested confessed and turned over his phone so that FBI agents could review the calls made from his phone around the time of the robberies. Soon afterwards, a magistrate judge, in accordance with the Stored Communications Act, granted the FBI's request to obtain "transactional records" from various wireless carriers for 16 different phone numbers for "[a]ll subscriber information, toll records and call detail records including listed and unlisted numbers dialed or otherwise transmitted to and from [the] target telephones... as well as cell site information for the target telephones at call origination and at call termination for incoming and outgoing calls[.]" The order granted by the magistrate judge was not a warrant, which requires probable cause. The 16 different phone numbers called or received by the confessed robber around the time of the robberies were not sufficient evidence to establish probable cause; however, it was sufficient evidence under the Stored Communications Act, which requires only "that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."
From the historical cell-site records, the government was able to determine that Carpenter's cellphone communicated with cell towers at the time and within a two-mile radius of four robberies. Carpenter was later charged and arrested and eventually convicted by a jury with several counts of aiding and abetting robbery that affected interstate commerce and of aiding and abetting the use or carriage of a firearm during a federal crime of violence. Carpenter was sentenced by Judge Sean Cox of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to 1395 months, or 116.25 years, in federal prison.
Sixth Circuit decision
Carpenter appealed his conviction and sentence to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The case was argued before a three-judge panel on October 14, 2015. On April 13, 2016 Judge Raymond Kethledge delivered the opinion of the Court, affirming Carpenter's conviction and sentence.
The Sixth Circuit relied on the Supreme Court's guidance from the Supreme Court's 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland to clarify that only the content of a person's communication is protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Court explained that "cell-site data -- like mailing addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses -- are information that facilitate personal communications, rather than part of the content of those communications themselves." Furthermore, the Court determined that the government obtained information from not Carpenter but the service provider's business records. Therefore, the government's collection of the service provider's business records did not constitute a "search" of Carpenter under the Fourth Amendment and so did not require a warrant.
Judge Jane Branstetter Stranch dissented from the majority's conclusion that the collection of the service provider's business records did not constitute a search. In her dissent, Judge Stranch states, "this case involves tracking physical location through cell towers and a personal phone, a device routinely carried on the individual's person; it also involves the compelled provision of records that reflect such tracking. In light of the personal tracking concerns articulated in our precedent, I am not convinced that the situation before us can be addressed appropriately with a test primarily used to obtain business records such as credit card purchases -- records that do not necessarily reflect personal location. And it seems to me that the business records test is ill suited to address the issues regarding personal location that are before us."
Amici curiae briefs
Amicus curiae briefs are unsolicited filings by unaffiliated parties who assist the Court by offering information related to the case. The parties listed below filed briefs in the case.
Grant of certiorari and oral argument
Carpenter petitioned for a writ of certiorari on September 26, 2016. On June 5, 2017, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case, and it granted Carpenter's petition for writ of certiorari. The Supreme Court heard Oral arguments on November 29, 2017. Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, argued on behalf of Carpenter. Michael Dreeben, the Deputy Solicitor General in charge of the US Department of Justice criminal docket before the Supreme Court, argued on behalf of the United States.
The Court will likely announce its decision prior to the conclusion of the October 2017 term, which ends in June 2018.
See also
- Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
- Stored Communications Act
- Mobile phone tracking
References
External links
- Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to Supreme Court
- Supreme Court Brief for Carpenter
- Supreme Court Brief for the United States
- Supreme Court Reply Brief for Carpenter
- Supreme Court Oral Argument Transcript
- Supreme Court Oyez Oral Argument Audio
Source of article : Wikipedia
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