Whether the search-incident-to-arrest exception permits police to search digital information stored on a cell phone seized from an arrestee without a warrant.
Holding
No. Police generally must obtain a warrant before searching digital information on a cell phone seized incident to a lawful arrest.
Reasoning
The Fourth Amendment generally requires a warrant for a search undertaken to uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing, unless a specific exception applies. The search-incident-to-arrest exception permits officers to search an arrestee and the area within the arrestee’s immediate control to remove weapons and prevent the concealment or destruction of evidence. Although the Court had applied that exception categorically to physical items carried on the person, the Court concluded that a mechanical extension of that rule to cell-phone data would be untethered from the justifications for the exception.
The officer-safety rationale does not justify a categorical search of digital data. A phone’s physical features may be examined to ensure that the device itself conceals a weapon, but data stored on the device cannot itself harm an officer or help an arrestee escape. The Government’s suggestion that phone data might reveal threats from accomplices was too speculative and too remote from the ordinary risks that accompany every custodial arrest. A genuine, case-specific emergency may instead be addressed through the exigent-circumstances exception.
The evidence-preservation rationale also does not support routine warrantless phone searches. Once police seize and secure a phone, the arrestee cannot delete its contents. Remote wiping and encryption can sometimes threaten data, but the Court found little evidence that those risks were prevalent and noted that officers can often reduce them by disconnecting the phone from the network, turning it off, removing its battery, or using an enclosure such as a Faraday bag. If a particular case presents a true “now or never” threat of destruction, exigent circumstances may permit an immediate search.
Cell phones implicate privacy interests far greater than those involved in searching physical containers such as cigarette packs, wallets, purses, or address books. Modern phones function as minicomputers and can hold millions of pages of text, thousands of photographs, hundreds of videos, communications histories, calendars, financial information, browsing histories, and location records. The quantity, variety, and historical depth of this information can reveal a detailed portrait of a person’s private life.
The privacy intrusion is also qualitatively different because phones may reveal especially sensitive information, including medical concerns, religious or political interests, associations, purchases, and precise location history. In addition, phones frequently give users access to remotely stored cloud data. Because officers often cannot tell whether viewed information is stored locally or remotely, treating a phone as an ordinary physical container risks reaching information well beyond the arrestee’s immediate possessions.
The Court rejected proposed middle-ground rules. Extending Arizona v. Gant to allow a search whenever officers reasonably believe a phone contains evidence of the offense would impose virtually no real limit, because phones may contain evidence of nearly any crime. Restricting searches to areas likely to hold evidence, identity information, or safety-related information would likewise leave officers with excessive discretion. Nor could officers always inspect a call log, because call logs contain identifying and personal information and their examination is plainly a Fourth Amendment search.
A rule permitting searches for digital equivalents of physical items was also unworkable and overbroad. The fact that an arrestee might physically carry a single photograph, note, or bank statement does not justify searching thousands of photographs, years of financial records, or every comparable digital file on a phone. Such an analogy would create difficult line-drawing problems and would substantially erode the privacy protection the Fourth Amendment requires.