The Founding Fathers would have protected your smartphone

As the Constitutional Accountability Center explains in its friend-of-the-court brief in Riley and Wurie, “Stated simply, the Framers wanted to strip the government of the arbitrary power to rifle through a person’s belongings in the hope of finding something incriminating.”

There can be little doubt that the modern smartphone is today’s equivalent of our Founders’ “papers and effects.”

The Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable, warrantless searches of these modern-day versions of “papers and effects.” Indeed, as the Cato Institute observes in its own friend-of-the-court brief, allowing for warrantless searches of cellphones “would throw open too-wide a door onto suspects’ personal and private information without judicial supervision. Cellphones are doorways into people’s lives as broad as the front doors of their homes.”

The government argued that public safety demands the police have unfettered liberty to search a person under arrest. This is a false tension between liberty and security; robust protection of our Fourth Amendment rights can coexist with the prerogatives of law enforcement. The Supreme Court already recognizes an exception when a search is necessary to protect officer safety or the destruction of evidence; that’s not at issue.