On Tuesday, two cases questioning the legality of mobile phone searches by police will be heard at the Supreme Court, Philly.com said. The cases had come amid the revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless collection of telephone records as part of its surveillance program. The Obama administration and the state of California had since then defended the searches, claiming that the mobile phone found in the person of an individual upon arrest is subject to scrutiny just like any other article and that police are authorized to search the items without a warrant.
Reuters said that the complication arises from the fact that usefulness of mobile phones have evolved from devices used to make calls into gadgets that contains a trove of personal information about the phone's owner.
The Supreme Court will need to determine whether the search done on the defendants in both cases violate the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches, Reuters said. The decision that will be made on both cases could be used in future litigation that will submit evidence from mobile phones in court.
According to Stanford Law School professor Jeffrey Fisher, the Supreme Court's participation in the issue is essential. Fisher, who represented one of the defendants, said, "In light of the frequency with which people are arrested with cell phones and the judiciary's confusion over whether the police may search the digital contents of those phones, this court's intervention is critical."
Hanni Fakhoury, who is also a lawyer for the digital civil rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an interview, "I think it's another opportunity for the court to decide how changes in technology implicate the Fourth Amendment."
The EFF submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to urge the court to hear the Massachusetts case of a defendant, whose phone is not a smartphone unlike the mobile phone of the defendant in the California case, Reuters reported.
