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**Frownland** · 11-29-2017, 10:40 AM

Carpenter v. United States

This case will determine whether or not big data can be appropriated as a government tracking tool.

Quote:

The Supreme Court has agreed to review an important case concerning the use of cell-phone location records by law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures." However, the Supreme Court has not previously had an opportunity to address the application of the Fourth Amendment to many types of modern data, including cell phone location data. Justice Sotomayor famously remarked in her concurring opinion in the 2012 decision in United States v. Jones that it "may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties," an approach that she described as "ill-suited to the digital age." This case provides an opportunity to reconsider that very question.

In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court will decide whether the seizure and search of 127 days' worth of an individual's cell phone location data is a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. In the criminal case below, the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan denied Defendant’s motion to suppress the location data, and later denied post-trial motion for acquittal, and motion for new trial. Carpenter appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court's decision. The government obtained the Defendant's location data under the Stored Communications Act, which requires phone companies to disclose certain historical call records when the government provides “specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe” that records at issue “are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”