Riley v. California: The Pandora’s Box in A Digital Age Restructuring of Fourth Amendment Law

This summer, the United States Supreme Court made a huge leap in upholding the people’s right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment in the unanimous decision, Riley v. California.  Riley created a bright-line rule, curbing police discretion, that cell phones (not only smart phones) are not reasonably subject to a search incident to arrest unless an extenuating circumstance is present. 

Privacy in a Tech World: Cellphone Data Requires a Warrant

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After Apple Inc. announced the release of the iPhone 6 models for September 19^th, the tech community roared in excitement about all of the new capabilities, and what a new smart phone could do for them.  With more than 1.2 million apps available, it’s pretty much a guarantee that “there’s an app for that.”  Increasingly, many people use apps for issues they may wish to keep private, such as sending confidential emails, or more controversially, for the “sexting” phenomenon.

Sam Sung Like a Canary: What Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie Mean For Digital Privacy Rights

“Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  Benjamin Franklin’s famous idiom, in essence, alludes to the fact that our most intimate secrets may never be safe in the hands of another.   In the age of the “Digital Revolution,” however, is our intimate information really safe in our own hands?  91% of adult American’s own cell phones today, and as the technology becomes more sophisticated, so does our use of it.  Thumbing through our phones is no longer about a list of names and numbers, it has evolved into much more sensitive information.  Our phones have become an extension of ourselves and contain information including emails, photos, and GPS data. Consequently, modern technology has courts struggling to apply a search-incident-to-arrest jurisprudence that was developed before the dawn of the digital era to the question of whether the Fourth Amendment permits warrantless searches of data on a cell phone seized from an individual.[1]  Accordingly, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in a set of pivotal constitutional privacy rights cases.