'Privacy comes at a cost,' Supreme Court says, and we should pay it; warrantless cell phone searches now illegal

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Rarely does a U.S. Supreme Court ruling have an immediate impact on the everyday lives of Americans, but this one might.

The U.S. Supreme Court pushed American law into the 21st Century a bit on Wednesday, ruling that cops can't search through the contents of suspects' cell phones before obtaining a proper court-issued warrant. In a rare bout of agreement, the court ruled 9-0 on two similar cases, one involving a smartphone, and one an old-fashioned flip phone. In both, SCOTUS ruled that rummaging through the data on a cell phone during a traffic stop or an arrest is precisely the kind of over-broad search that the Founding Fathers wanted to ban when they wrote the Fourth Amendment.

"Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself," the court wrote in its ruling. More on that in a moment.

The ruling will have an immediate impact on the way police officers do their job. Citizens who are arrested are still subject to having their phones seized, but law enforcement officials will not be able to search the devices without obtaining the explicit permission of a judge.

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In other words, don't let a cop look through your phone during a traffic stop. I'd be careful about handing a smartphone to a cop to show your proof of insurance card, too -- naturally, you can still voluntarily give cops the right to search your phone, and that *might* be considered granting permission.

The ruling has the potential to make life harder for cops, the court conceded, but that is an appropriate trade-off to preserve privacy rights.

"We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime," the court said. "Privacy comes at a cost."

The U.S. Justice Department had argued that cell phone searches should be a form of permissible search because evidence on seized cell phones could theoretically be destroyed remotely, or encrypted. The court dismissed that argument out of hand, saying the government's briefing revealed "little indication that either problem is prevalent or that the opportunity to perform a search incident to arrest would be an effective solution."

The court did note that the "exigent circumstances" exception remains in effect, so law enforcement need not fret *that* much -- under limited circumstances, when there is some kind of an emergency in progress, police can still search a cell phone and answer for their actions later to a court. If police believe a suspect had been texting with an accomplice who was about the set off a bomb, for example, an exigent circumstances exception would apply.

"In light of the availability of the exigent circumstances exception, there is no reason to believe that law enforcement officers will not be able to address some of the more extreme hypotheticals that have been suggested," the court wrote.

The ruling includes some grandiose language - dare I say a history lesson - that might suggest the Supremes are ready to push the privacy vs. security line back closer to where it belongs. It's nice to see the court tip its hat to history so directly. The rest of the quote above is below. "Writs of assistance" basically allowed British soldiers to rummage through colonials' homes for any reason.

"Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself," the court wrote in its ruling. "In 1761, the patriot James Otis delivered a speech, in Boston denouncing the use of writes of assistance. A young John Adams was there and he would later write that 'every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance...Otis' speech was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. (Adams wrote that) then and there the the child Independence was born."

Sure sounds like the NSA has some 'splaining to do.

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exigent circumstances