Supreme Court rules that warrant is needed to access cell tower records

In a major win for privacy rights, the Supreme Court put new restraints on law enforcement’s access to the ever-increasing amount of private information about Americans available in the digital age. In the specific case before the court, the justices ruled that authorities generally must obtain a warrant to gain access to cell-tower records that can provide a virtual timeline and map of a person’s whereabouts. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 5 to 4 decision, in which he was joined by the court’s liberal members. The majority declared that the Fourth Amendment guarantees an expectation of privacy and that allowing police to obtain moment-by-moment tracking of an individual's cellphone location is a kind of surveillance that the framers of the Constitution did not want to occur without a search warrant.  It was an example of what Chief Justice Roberts has called one of the greatest challenges for the court: applying the Constitution and the court’s precedents to technology that evolves more quickly than the law.  He stressed, however, that this is a narrowly focused opinion that leaves intact other precedents when it comes to dealing with financial information, banking and office records. Chief Justice Roberts noted that the decision also allows for warrantless cell-tower location information searches in emergencies and for national-security purposes.