Latest in Carpenter v. United States
The Supreme Court’s landmark Fourth Amendment decision in Carpenter could impose new limits on aerial surveillance.
With the right safeguards, aggressive disease surveillance is likely permissible under the Fourth Amendment.
In a federal prosecution for armed bank robbery, a defendant challenges a geofence warrant.
In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment applies when the government acquires large amounts of cell-phone location data.
I recently posted a new draft article, “Implementing Carpenter,” on the Supreme Court's blockbuster June 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States.
Last June in a 5-4 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court extended Fourth Amendment protections to an individual’s cell phone location data for the first time.
In a fascinating decision, Naperville Smart Meter Awareness v. City of Naperville, the Seventh Circuit has held that a public utility commits a "search" of a home when it records every 15 minutes how much electricity the utility is providing the home, at least until the smart readers that enable this data collection come into general public use.
Writing for the majority in Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts called the court’s momentous Fourth Amendment decision “a narrow one.” The specific holding—that a warrant is required for law enforcement to access historical cell site location information (CSLI)—may indeed be narrow, and the decision rightfully cautions that “the Court must tread carefully” when considering new technologies.
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States has lots of new directions in it. One direction that some commentators have focused on is its impact on the law of subpoenas.