Digital Ubiquity and the Fourth Amendment

Perhaps in no situation can such disclosure be as injurious as when the recipient of the information is a representative of law enforcement. Given the protection from an unreasonable search and seizure enumerated in our constitution that give ballast to notions of privacy and autonomy, questions have arisen as to when a law enforcement search can square with these rights, particularly when it is effectuated without the imprimatur of a warrant. That the aforementioned devices now function as virtual warehouses of information has exacerbated the tension between effective policing and privacy rights deemed inseparable from the notion of ordered liberty.

The Supreme Court confronted this tension in its previous term, and came down decidedly in favor of the privacy interests in Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473 (2014). Chief Justice John Roberts, in writing for a unanimous court, held that because “cell phones differ in both a quantitative and qualitative sense from other objects” kept on an arrestee's person, greater privacy interests are potentially impinged by the search of a cell phone. Accordingly, Fourth Amendment analysis must be sculpted in a way so as to recognize that a search incident to an arrest can now reveal exponentially more personal, and often incriminating, information.