Searches and Fourth Amendment Protections

Searches and Fourth Amendment Protections
In Carpenter v. the United States, 585 US (2018), the Supreme Court held that obtaining the cell site location information (CSLI) by police amounts to a “search”, which requires a warrant as provided in the Fourth Amendment. This decision overturned a long-held concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy” that has faced challenges in the technological era that has redefined the concept of privacy. In this case, police obtained orders under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) section 2703(d) to access records from the communications service provider. Citing 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d), the police argued that the phone records would facilitate the tracking and arrest of accomplices attached to a man suspected in a series of Michigan and Ohio robberies.
The court, through Chief Justice Roberts, reasoned that CSLI fails to fit under the existing precedents as argued in S...