Source: http://digitalworkplace.teachthroughtech.org/sample-page/communications/cell-phone-privacy-rights/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 09:58:57+00:00

Document:
Petitioner David Riley, belonging to the Lincoln Park gang in San Diego, California, opened fire on a rival gang member on August 2, 2009. A few weeks later on August 22, 2009, the police pulled Riley over for driving on expired license registration tags; as a result of driving with expired tags, the car was to be impounded by the police. As part of the impoundment process, police were to perform an inventory search on the vehicle, including its internal components, to discover possible contraband as well as protect against any liability claims slated towards the driver of the vehicle in the future. Regarding the pullover in this particular case, the police found two guns in the vehicle, then arresting Riley for possession of firearms. Upon Riley’s arrest, the police also found a cellphone within Riley’s pockets, which was seized by police and then searched; evidence of gang involvement were found on the cellphone. The shooting that occurred on August 2, 2009 was tied to Riley in addition to charges for attempted murder, assault, and shooting at an occupied vehicle.
Riley was convicted of all three counts and was sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.
The Supreme Court decided that the evidence seized from the cell phone of a gang member was not to be used in Court as it was a part of an unreasonable search. Digital data (which may contain evidence) has the ability to be preserved while waiting for a warrant by using a “Faraday Bag.” Thus, the evidence collected without a warrant from the cell phone, in this particular case, was protected under the Fourth Amendment of unreasonable search and seizure.
Officer conducted an inventory search of the car. Riley was arrested for possession of concealed and loaded firearms when that search turned up two handguns under the cars hood. See Cal. Penal Code Ann. §§12025(a)(1), 12031(a)(1) (West 2009).
An officer searched Riley incident to the arrest and found items associated with the “Bloods” street gang. He also seized a cell phone from Riley’s pants pocket. According to Riley’s uncontradicted assertion, the phone was a “smart phone,” a cell phone with a broad range of other functions based on advanced computing capability, large storage capacity, and Internet connectivity. The officer accessed information on the phone and noticed that some words (presumably in text messages or a contacts list)were preceded by the letters “CK”—a label that, he believed, stood for “Crip Killers,” a slang term for members of the Bloods gang.
At the police station about two hours after the arrest, a detective specializing in gangs further examined the contents of the phone. The detective testified that he “went through” Riley’s phone “looking for evidence, because . . . gang members will often video themselves with guns or take pictures of themselves with the guns.” App. in No. 13–132, p. 20. Although there was “a lot of stuff ” on the phone, particular files that “caught [the detective’s] eye” included videos of young men sparring while someone yelled encouragement using the moniker “Blood.” Id., at 11–13. The police also found photographs of Riley standing in front of a car they suspected had been involved in a shooting a few weeks earlier.
Riley was ultimately charged, in connection with that earlier shooting, with firing at an occupied vehicle, assault with a semiautomatic firearm, and attempted murder. The State alleged that Riley had committed those crimes for the benefit of a criminal street gang, an aggravating factor that carries an enhanced sentence. Compare Cal.
Penal Code Ann. §246 (2008) with §186.22(b)(4)(B) (2014).Prior to trial, Riley moved to suppress all evidence that the police had obtained from his cell phone. He contended that the searches of his phone violated the Fourth Amendment, because they had been performed without a warrant and were not otherwise justified by exigent circumstances. The trial court rejected that argument. App. in No. 13–132, at 24, 26. At Riley’s trial, police officers testified about the photographs and videos found on the phone, and some of the photographs were admitted into evidence. Riley was convicted on all three counts and received an enhanced sentence of 15 years to life in prison.
Source identified as “my house” on the phone’s external screen. A few minutes later, they opened the phone and saw a photograph of a woman and a baby set as the phone’s wallpaper. They pressed one button on the phone to access its call log, then another button to determine the phone number associated with the “my house” label. They next used an online phone directory to trace that phone number to an apartment building.
When the officers went to the building, they saw Wurie’s name on a mailbox and observed through a window a woman who resembled the woman in the photograph on Wurie’s phone. They secured the apartment while obtaining a search warrant and, upon later executing the warrant, found and seized 215 grams of crack cocaine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, a firearm and ammunition, and cash.
As the text makes clear, “the ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is ‘reasonableness.’” Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U. S. 398, 403 (2006). Our cases have determined that “[w]here a search is undertaken by law enforcement officials to discover evidence of criminal wrong doing, . . . reasonableness generally requires the obtaining of a judicial warrant.” Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton, 515 U. S. 646, 653 (1995). Such a warrant ensures that the inferences to support a search are “drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.” Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 14 (1948). In the absence of a warrant, a search is reasonable only if it falls within a specific exception to the warrant requirement. See Kentucky v. King, 563 U. S. ___, ___ (2011) (slip op., at 5–6).
Misnomer in this context, as warrantless searches incident to arrest occur with far greater frequency than searches conducted pursuant to a warrant. See 3 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure §5.2(b), p. 132, and n. 15 (5th ed. 2012).
The first, Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969), laid the groundwork for most of the existing search incident to arrest doctrine. Police officers in that case arrested Chimel inside his home and proceeded to search his entire three-bedroom house, including the attic and garage. In particular rooms, they also looked through the contents of drawers. Id., at 753–754.
Four years later, in United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218 (1973), the Court applied the Chimel analysis in the context of a search of the arrestee’s person. A police officer had arrested Robinson for driving with a revoked license. The officer conducted a pat down search and felt an object that he could not identify in Robinson’s coat pocket. He removed the object, which turned out to be a crumpled cigarette package and opened it. Inside were 14 capsules of heroin. Id., at 220, 223.
was reasonable even though there was no concern about the loss of evidence, and the arresting officer had no specific concern that Robinson might be armed. Id., at 236. In doing so, the Court did not draw a line between a search of Robinson’s person and a further examination of the cigarette pack found during that search. It merely noted that, “[h]aving in the course of a lawful search come upon the crumpled package of cigarettes, [the officer] was entitled to inspect it.” Ibid. A few years later, the Court clarified that this exception was limited to “personal property . . . immediately associated with the person of the arrestee.” United States v. Chadwick, 433 U. S. 1, 15 (1977) (200-pound, locked footlocker could not be searched incident to arrest), abrogated on other grounds by California v. Acevedo, 500 U. S. 565 (1991).
The search incident to arrest trilogy concludes with Gant, which analyzed searches of an arrestee’s vehicle. Gant, like Robinson, recognized that the Chimel concerns for officer safety and evidence preservation underlie the search incident to arrest exception. See 556 U. S., at 338. As a result, the Court concluded that Chimel could authorize police to search a vehicle “only when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search.” 556 U. S., at 343. Gant added, however, an independent exception for a warrantless search of a vehicle’s passenger compartment“when it is ‘reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.’” Ibid. (quoting Thornton v. United States, 541 U. S. 615, 632 (2004) (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment)). That exception stems not from Chimel, the Court explained, but from“circumstances unique to the vehicle context.” 556 U. S., at 343.
to arrest doctrine applies to modern cell phones, which are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy. A smart phone of the sort taken from Riley was unheard of ten years ago;a significant majority of American adults now own such phones. See A. Smith, Pew Research Center, SmartphoneOwnership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013). Even less sophisticated phones like Wurie’s, which have already faded in popularity since Wurie was arrested in 2007, have been around for less than 15 years. Both phones are based on technology nearly inconceivable just a few decades ago, when Chimel and Robinson were decided.
Absent more precise guidance from the founding era, we generally determine whether to exempt a given type of search from the warrant requirement “by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.” Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U. S. 295, 300 (1999). Such a balancing of interests supported the search incident to arrest exception in Robinson, and a mechanical application of Robinson might well support the warrantless searches at issue here.
U. S., at 235. Rather than requiring the “case-by-case adjudication” that Robinson rejected, ibid., we ask instead whether application of the search incident to arrest doctrine to this particular category of effects would “untether the rule from the justifications underlying the Chimel exception,” Gant, supra, at 343. See also Knowles v. Iowa, 525 U. S. 113, 119 (1998) (declining to extend Robinson to the issuance of citations, “a situation where the concern for officer safety is not present to the same extent and the concern for destruction or loss of evidence is not present at all”).
Perhaps the same might have been said of the cigarette pack seized from Robinson’s pocket. Once an officer gained control of the pack, it was unlikely that Robinson could have accessed the pack’s contents. But unknown physical objects may always pose risks, no matter how slight, during the tense atmosphere of a custodial arrest. The officer in Robinson testified that he could not identify the objects in the cigarette pack but knew they were not cigarettes. See 414 U. S., at 223, 236, n. 7. Given that, a further search was a reasonable protective measure. No such unknowns exist with respect to digital data. As the First Circuit explained, the officers who searched Wurie’s cell phone “knew exactly what they would find therein:data. They also knew that the data could not harm them.”728 F. 3d, at 10.
exigent circumstances. See, e.g., Warden, Md. Penitentiary v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 298–299 (1967) (“The Fourth Amendment does not require police officers to delay in the course of an investigation if to do so would gravely endanger their lives or the lives of others.”).
v. McArthur, 531 U. S. 326, 331–333 (2001); Chadwick, supra, at 13, and n. 8. And once law enforcement officers have secured a cell phone, there is no longer any risk that the arrestee himself will be able to delete incriminating data from the phone.
renders a phone all but “unbreakable” unless police know the password. Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae in No. 13–132, p. 11.
764. With respect to remote wiping, the Government’s primary concern turns on the actions of third parties who are not present at the scene of arrest. And data encryption is even further afield. There, the Government focuses on the ordinary operation of a phone’s security features,apart from any active attempt by a defendant or his associates to conceal or destroy evidence upon arrest.
p. 48. Similarly, the opportunities for officers to search a password-protected phone before data becomes encrypted are quite limited. Law enforcement officers are very unlikely to come upon such a phone in an unlocked state because most phones lock at the touch of a button or, as a default, after some very short period of inactivity. See, e.g., iPhone User Guide for iOS 7.1 Software 10 (2014) (default lock after about one minute). This may explain why the encryption argument was not made until the merits stage in this Court, and has never been considered by the Courts of Appeals.
19. Cell phone data would be vulnerable to remote wiping from the time an individual anticipates arrest to the time any eventual search of the phone is completed, which might be at the station house hours later. Likewise, an officer who seizes a phone in an unlocked state might not be able to begin his search in the short time remaining before the phone locks and data becomes encrypted.
In any event, as to remote wiping, law enforcement is not without specific means to address the threat. Remote wiping can be fully prevented by disconnecting a phone from the network. There are at least two simple ways todo this: First, law enforcement officers can turn the phone off or remove its battery. Second, if they are concerned about encryption or other potential problems, they can leave a phone powered on and place it in an enclosure that isolates the phone from radio waves. See Ayers 30–31.Such devices are commonly called “Faraday bags,” after the English scientist Michael Faraday. They are essentially sandwich bags made of aluminum foil: cheap, lightweight, and easy to use. See Brief for Criminal Law Professors as Amici Curiae 9. They may not be a complete answer to the problem, see Ayers 32, but at least for now they provide a reasonable response. In fact, a number of law enforcement agencies around the country already encourage the use of Faraday bags. See, e.g., Dept. of Justice, National Institute of Justice, Electronic Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for First Responders 14, 32(2d ed. Apr. 2008); Brief for Criminal Law Professors as Amici Curiae 4–6.
those concerns. If “the police are truly confronted with a ‘now or never’ situation,”—for example, circumstances suggesting that a defendant’s phone will be the target of an imminent remote-wipe attempt—they may be able to rely on exigent circumstances to search the phone immediately. Missouri v. McNeely, 569 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (slip op., at 10) (quoting Roaden v. Kentucky, 413 U. S. 496, 505 (1973); some internal quotation marks omitted).Or, if officers happen to seize a phone in an unlocked state, they may be able to disable a phone’s automatic-lock feature in order to prevent the phone from locking and encrypting data. See App. to Reply Brief in No. 13–132, p.3a (diagramming the few necessary steps). Such a preventive measure could be analyzed under the principles set forth in our decision in McArthur, 531 U. S. 326, which approved officers’ reasonable steps to secure a scene to preserve evidence while they awaited a warrant. See id., at 331–333.
ing and an inspection of the cigarette pack found in his pocket constituted only minor additional intrusions compared to the substantial government authority exercised in taking Robinson into custody. See Chadwick, 433 U. S., at 16, n. 10 (searches of a person are justified in part by “reduced expectations of privacy caused by the arrest”).
U. S., at 766–767, n. 12. Because a search of the arrestee’s entire house was a substantial invasion beyond the arrest itself, the Court concluded that a warrant was required.
Robinson is the only decision from this Court applying Chimel to a search of the contents of an item found on an arrestee’s person. In an earlier case, this Court had approved a search of a zipper bag carried by an arrestee, but the Court analyzed only the validity of the arrest itself. See Draper v. United States, 358 U. S. 307, 310–311 (1959). Lower courts applying Robinson and Chimel, however, have approved searches of a variety of personal items carried by an arrestee. See, e.g., United States v. Carrion, 809 F. 2d 1120, 1123, 1128 (CA5 1987) (billfold and address book); United States v. Watson, 669 F. 2d 1374, 1383–1384 (CA11 1982) (wallet); United States v. Lee, 501 F. 2d 890, 892 (CADC 1974) (purse).
United States in No. 13–212, p. 26. That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together. Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse. A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee’s pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but any extension of that reasoning to digital data has to rest on its own bottom.
1 Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee’s person. The term “cell phone” is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras,video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers. One of the most notable distinguishing features of modern cell phones is their immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy. See Kerr, Foreword: Accounting for Technological Change, 36 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 403, 404–405 (2013). Most people cannot lug around every piece of mail they have received for the past several months, every picture they have taken, or every book or article they have read—nor would they have any reason to attempt to do so. And if they did, they would have to drag behind them a trunk of the sort held to require a search warrant in Chadwick, supra, rather than a container the size of the cigarette package in Robinson.
v. Flores-Lopez, 670 F. 3d 803, 806 (CA7 2012). We expect that the gulf between physical practicability and digital capacity will only continue to widen in the future.
Finally, there is an element of pervasiveness that characterizes cell phones but not physical records. Prior to the digital age, people did not typically carry a cache of sensitive personal information with them as they went about their day. Now it is the person who is not carrying a cellphone, with all that it contains, who is the exception. According to one poll, nearly three-quarters of smartphone users report being within five feet of their phones most of the time, with 12% admitting that they even use their phones in the shower. See Harris Interactive, 2013 Mobile Consumer Habits Study (June 2013). A decade ago police officers searching an arrestee might have occasionally stumbled across a highly personal item such as a diary. See, e.g., United States v. Frankenberry, 387 F. 2d 337 (CA2 1967) (per curiam). But those discoveries were likely to be few and far between. Today, by contrast, it is no exaggeration to say that many of the more than 90% of American adults who own a cell phone keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives—from the mundane to the intimate. See Ontario v. Quon, 560 U. S. 746, 760 (2010). Allowing the police to scrutinize such records on a routine basis is quite different from allowing them to search a personal item or two in the occasional case.
Data on a cell phone can also reveal where a person has been. Historic location information is a standard feature on many smart phones and can reconstruct someone’s specific movements down to the minute, not only around town but also within a particular building. See United States v. Jones, 565 U. S. ___, ___ (2012) (SOTOMAYOR, J., concurring) (slip op., at 3) (“GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”).
Previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form—unless the phone is.
n. 4 (1981) (describing a “container” as “any object capable of holding another object”). But the analogy crumbles entirely when a cell phone is used to access data located elsewhere, at the tap of a screen. That is what cell phones, with increasing frequency, are designed to do by taking advantage of “cloud computing.” Cloud computing is the capacity of Internet-connected devices to display data stored on remote servers rather than on the device itself. Cell phone users often may not know whether particular information is stored on the device or in the cloud, and it generally makes little difference. See Brief for Electronic Privacy Information Center in No. 13–132, at 12–14, 20. Moreover, the same type of data may be stored locally on the device for one user and in the cloud for another.
to the vehicle context” to endorse a search solely for the purpose of gathering evidence. 556 U. S., at 343. JUSTICE SCALIA’s Thornton opinion, on which Gant was based, explained that those unique circumstances are “a reduced expectation of privacy” and “heightened law enforcement needs” when it comes to motor vehicles. 541 U. S., at 631; see also Wyoming v. Houghton, 526 U. S., at 303–304. For reasons that we have explained, cell phone searches bear neither of those characteristics.
At any rate, a Gant standard would prove no practical limit at all when it comes to cell phone searches. In the vehicle context, Gant generally protects against searches for evidence of past crimes. See 3 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure §7.1(d), at 709, and n. 191. In the cell phone context, however, it is reasonable to expect that incriminating information will be found on a phone regardless of when the crime occurred. Similarly, in the vehicle context Gant restricts broad searches resulting from minor crimes such as traffic violations. See id., §7.1(d), at 713, and n.
204. That would not necessarily be true for cell phones. It would be a particularly inexperienced or unimaginative law enforcement officer who could not come up with several reasons to suppose evidence of just about any crime could be found on a cell phone. Even an individual pulled over for something as basic as speeding might well have locational data dispositive of guilt on his phone. An individual pulled over for reckless driving might have evidence on the phone that shows whether he was texting while driving. The sources of potential pertinent information are virtually unlimited, so applying the Gant standard to cell phones would in effect give “police officers unbridled discretion to rummage at will among a person’s private effects.” 556 U. S., at 345.
Information relevant to the crime, the arrestee’s identity, or officer safety will be discovered. See Brief for United States in No. 13–212, at 51–53. This approach would again impose few meaningful constraints on officers. The proposed categories would sweep in a great deal of information, and officers would not always be able to discern in advance what information would be found where.
We also reject the United States’ final suggestion that officers should always be able to search a phone’s call log,as they did in Wurie’s case. The Government relies on Smith v. Maryland, 442 U. S. 735 (1979), which held that no warrant was required to use a pen register at telephone company premises to identify numbers dialed by a particular caller. The Court in that case, however, concluded that the use of a pen register was not a “search” at all under the Fourth Amendment. See id., at 745–746. There is no dispute here that the officers engaged in a search of Wurie’s cell phone. Moreover, call logs typically contain more than just phone numbers; they include any identifying information that an individual might add, such as the label “my house” in Wurie’s case.
Range of items contained on a phone, even though people would be unlikely to carry such a variety of information in physical form. In Riley’s case, for example, it is implausible that he would have strolled around with video tapes, photo albums, and an address book all crammed into his pockets. But because each of those items has a pre-digital analog, police under California’s proposal would be able to search a phone for all of those items—a significant diminution of privacy.
U. S. 1, ___ (2011) (SCALIA, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 7)(discussing the Court’s analog test under the Armed Career Criminal Act).
v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 481 (1971). Recent technological advances similar to those discussed here have, in addition, made the process of obtaining a warrant itself more efficient. See McNeely, 569 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11–12); id., at ___ (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (slip op., at 8) (describing jurisdiction where “police officers can e-mail warrant requests to judges’ iPads [and] judges have signed such warrants and e-mailed them back to officers in less than 15 minutes”).
U. S., at ___. In Chadwick, for example, the Court held that the exception for searches incident to arrest did not justify a search of the trunk at issue, but noted that “if officers have reason to believe that luggage contains some immediately dangerous instrumentality, such as explosives, it would be foolhardy to transport it to the stationhouse without opening the luggage.” 433 U. S., at 15, n. 9.
—————— 2In Wurie’s case, for example, the dissenting First Circuit judge argued that exigent circumstances could have justified a search of Wurie’s phone. See 728 F. 3d 1, 17 (2013) (opinion of Howard, J.) (discussing the repeated unanswered calls from “my house,” the suspected location of a drug stash). But the majority concluded that the Government had not made an exigent circumstances argument. See id., at 1. The Government acknowledges the same in this Court. See Brief for United States in No. 13–212, p. 28, n. 8.
opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.” Id., at 248 (quoted in Boyd v. United States, 116 U. S. 616, 625 (1886)).
Interpretation 28 (1969); Amar, Fourth Amendment First Principles, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 757, 764 (1994). In Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383, 392 (1914), we held that the Fourth Amendment did not disturb this rule. See also Taylor, supra, at 45; Stuntz, The Substantive Origins of Criminal Procedure, 105 Yale L. J. 393, 401 (1995) (“The power to search incident to arrest—a search of the arrested suspect’s person . . .—was well established in the mid-eighteenth century, and nothing in . . . the Fourth Amendment changed that”). And neither in Weeks nor in any of the authorities discussing the old common-law rule have I found any suggestion that it was based exclusively or primarily on the need to protect arresting officers or to prevent the destruction of evidence.
On the contrary, when pre-Weeks authorities discussed the basis for the rule, what was mentioned was the need to obtain probative evidence. For example, an 1839 case stated that “it is clear, and beyond doubt, that . . . constables . . . are entitled, upon a lawful arrest by them of one charged with treason or felony, to take and detain property found in his possession which will form material evidence in his prosecution for that crime.” See Dillon v. O’Brien, 16 Cox Crim. Cas. 245, 249–251 (1887) (citing Regina, v. Frost, 9 Car. & P. 129, 173 Eng. Rep. 771)). The court noted that the origins of that rule “deriv[e] from the interest which the State has in a person guilty (or reasonably believed to be guilty) of a crime being brought to justice, and in a prosecution, once commenced, being determined in due course of law.” 16 Cox Crim. Cas., at 249–250. See also Holker v. Hennessey, 141 Mo. 527, 537– 540, 42 S. W. 1090, 1093 (1897).
defendant are bound to take from his person any articles which may be of use as proof in the trial of the offense with which the defendant is charged”); J. Bishop, Criminal Procedure §§210–212, p. 127 (2d ed. 1872) (if an arresting officer finds “about the prisoner’s person, or otherwise in his possession, either goods or moneys which there is reason to believe are connected with the supposed crime as its fruits, or as the instruments with which it was committed, or as directly furnishing evidence relating to the transaction, he may take the same, and hold them to be disposed of as the court may direct”).
taken away from an arrestee (something that obviously must be done before the items are read), there is no risk that the arrestee will destroy them. Nor is there any risk that leaving these items unread will endanger the arresting officers.
The idea that officer safety and the preservation of evidence are the sole reasons for allowing a warrantless search incident to arrest appears to derive from the Court’s reasoning in Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969), a case that involved the lawfulness of a search of the scene of an arrest, not the person of an arrestee. As I have explained, Chimel’s reasoning is questionable, see Arizona v. Gant, 556 U. S. 332, 361–363 (2009) (ALITO, J., dissenting), and I think it is a mistake to allow that reasoning to affect cases like these that concern the search of the person of arrestees.
the bill lists an incriminating call to a long-distance number. He also has in his a wallet a few snapshots, and one of these is incriminating. Suspect number two has in his pocket a cell phone, the call log of which shows a call to the same incriminating number. In addition, a number of photos are stored in the memory of the cell phone, and one of these is incriminating. Under established law, the police may seize and examine the phone bill and the snapshots in the wallet without obtaining a warrant, but under the Court’s holding today, the information stored in the cell phone is out.
Since that time, electronic surveillance has been governed primarily, not by decisions of this Court, bu by the statute, which authorizes but imposes detailed restrictions on electronic surveillance. See ibid.
Modern cell phones are of great value for both lawful and unlawful purposes. They can be used in committing many serious crimes, and they present new and difficult law enforcement problems. See Brief for United States in No. 13–212, pp. 2–3. At the same time, because of the role that these devices have come to play in contemporary life,searching their contents implicates very sensitive privacy interests that this Court is poorly positioned to understand and evaluate. Many forms of modern technology are making it easier and easier for both government and private entities to amass a wealth of information about the lives of ordinary Americans, and at the same time, many ordinary Americans are choosing to make public much information that was seldom revealed to outsiders just a few decades ago.

References: §246
 §186
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 §5
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 

v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 

v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 §7
 §7
 v. 

v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v.