The Supreme Court Tells the Government to Get a Warrant

The Supreme Court can’t dodge ‘em all. So, on Friday, it actually decided Carpenter v. United States, a closely watched case testing how federal law-enforcement agents could legally obtain four months’ worth of cell phone location records as part of an investigation of a rash of bank robberies in Michigan.

The government had not argued that it could simply demand the location records from a cellular service provider; it had argued that a federal statute, the Stored Communications Act, gave it the authority to get the records by showing a federal magistrate that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that they were “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” In response, the court did not hold that the government couldn’t get cell phone location records; it said it can—providing it gets a search warrant. A warrant requires “probable cause,” a higher standard than that set by the act.