Will the Supreme Court ever figure out technology?

The Supreme Court issued two major rulings: in Riley v. California, the court required cops to get a warrant before searching cellphones, and in American Broadcasting v. Aereo, the court banned the cloud-TV service Aereo from retransmitting broadcast television signals over the Internet. But both of these cases are also fundamentally about technology -- specifically, what happens when technology moves so fast that the law simply doesn't understand it anymore.

When that happens, it's up to the courts to provide answers to difficult questions: is searching a smartphone like searching a pack of cigarettes? Can thousands of tiny antennas and some clever code dance around copyright law well enough to create a new business model?

To answer these questions is to answer the hardest question of all: can you put the technology back in the box, or do we need to change society around it for good? The Supreme Court took a huge step when it agreed 9-0 that the smartphone revolution requires a change in how we interpret the Fourth Amendment. But the hard part for our legal system will be the thousands of little steps we need to ensure all those smartphone apps can keep changing the world.