Supreme Court cellphone ruling hints at broader curbs on surveillance

The words “National Security Agency” appear nowhere in the Supreme Court’s opinion prohibiting cellphone searches without a warrant. But the unanimous ruling makes clear that the nation’s most important jurists are tuned in to the roiling debate about high-tech surveillance and concerned about government officials going too far.

In broad, passionate language -- spiked with the occasional joke -- the ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserts that the vast troves of information police can find in modern cellphones are no less worthy of constitutional protection than the private papers that Founding Fathers once kept locked in wooden file cabinets inside their homes. Such declarations, experts said, suggest a willingness to reconsider legal rulings long used to justify modern surveillance tools. That includes some spying technologies that were unimaginable when courts first articulated those arguments but that now are routinely used by a range of government agencies, including the NSA, the FBI and many state and local police forces. A footnote in the ruling cautions against assuming too much about the court’s views on data collection “under other circumstances.” But legal experts on both sides of the privacy debate took notice of the unanimity of the ruling and the uncommonly strong language Chief Justice Roberts used when describing the privacy risks in modern technologies.