The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this term that experts are calling a "blockbuster" and could have significant implications on one's expectations of privacy.
The case, Carpenter v. U.S., raises the question of whether the federal government's search and seizure of cellphone records without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment.
The case stems from a string of armed robberies in Ohio and Michigan in 2010 and 2011. During its investigation into the robberies, the federal government applied for and obtained court orders to access cellphone location records for several suspects, including Timothy Carpenter, the lead plaintiff in the case.
The government received several months of information, including the dates and times of calls, as well as "cell site information for the target telephones at call origination and at call termination for incoming and outgoing calls." Cell site information location is the information generated with a cellphone communicates with a nearby cell tower. According to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, that information from cell towers can mark that phone's location, allowing "law enforcement to piece together past events, 9 for example, by connecting a suspect to the location of a past crime."
The court order that addressed Carpenter was specifically directed toward MetroPCS, his cellphone provider, and the company handed over 127 days of cell-site information, or location records, which showed 12,898 separate points of location data.
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01.20.2025