SCOTUS Gets It: Encryption Is a Basic Security Feature, Not a Sign You Have Something to Hide

[Commentary] If you kept all your private physical information in a locked trunk, the government would need a warrant to search it. “Most people cannot lug around every piece of mail they have received for the past several months, every picture they have taken, or every book or article they have read,” the Chief Justice John Roberts said in Riley v. California. If people did, “they would have to drag a trunk behind them.”

Searching a trunk should, and does, require a warrant. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Riley v. California says that modern “trunks” like phones, computers and cloud services should be no different. In straightforward language, the Chief Justice demolishes the notions that have obscured the basic fact that the constitution entitles us to “the right to be secure” in our “persons, houses, papers and effects.”

Importantly for digital privacy and security companies, the Supreme Court had no time for the government’s complaints that common security features -- like encryption -- justified dispensing with Constitutional protections. It is clear that the justices saw encryption correctly, as an ordinary and prudent privacy protection, not as some exotic feature designed to thwart the needs of law enforcement.

[Edgar is Visiting Fellow, Brown University]