PS1010 Columbia Southern Public Safety vs Individual Privacy Case Analysis Instructions Right to Privacy Case Study Certain freedoms such as civil libert

PS1010 Columbia Southern Public Safety vs Individual Privacy Case Analysis Instructions

Right to Privacy Case Study

Certain freedoms such as civil liberties and civil rights are concepts highly revered by Americans; however, there are times when these two concepts conflict in the name of safety and national security. The Digital Age is having a profound effect on the privacy of individuals in both their daily and private lives. With technology like cameras and smartphones, the activities of people are being recorded more, whether it is running a red light, entering a building, playing in a park, or using an ATM machine.

In this assignment, you will analyze a case involving public safety versus an individual’s privacy. Read the following article from the New York Times concerning Carpenter v. United States, a case recently decided by the Supreme Court.

Liptak, A. (2018, June 23). Warrant required for cellphone tracking data. New York Times, p. A1(L). Retrieved fromhttp://link.galegroup.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/apps/doc/A543973598/ STND?u=oran95108&sid=STND&xid=753160e8

For more background on the case, here is a link to the actual opinion written for this case: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf

Please answer the following questions concerning this case. Address the questions in a cohesive essay. It should be at least two pages in length and should be double-spaced, and typed in 12-point Times New Roman font. Please be sure to provide an introduction to your essay,

Which part of the Constitution addresses individual privacy rights? Do you believe that, with today’s technology, the Constitution still adequately protects those rights? Why, or why not?
Describe the issue that was debated in this case. How was the need for public safety and security balanced with individual civil liberties and civil rights impacted by the final ruling in this case?
Do you agree with the majority opinion or the dissenting opinion in this case? Explain your response. Where do you personally draw the line in this privacy issue?
Explain how historical thought and tradition affect civil liberties and rights as they pertain to the issue presented in this case.
Describe how politics can intersect with civil rights.
What consequences do you support for those who violate constitutional rights?
What, if any, compensation do you recommend for individuals whose rights have been violated by others?

You must use at least two sources, in addition to the article given, to support your response. Make sure that all sources are cited and referenced using APA style. Warrant Required for Cellphone Tracking Data
Adam Liptak
The New York Times. (June 23, 2018): News: pA1(L). From Business Collection.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
WASHINGTON — In a major statement on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court
ruled on Friday that the government generally needs a warrant to collect troves of
location data about the customers of cellphone companies.
”We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of
physical location information,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
The 5-to-4 ruling will protect ”deeply revealing” records associated with 400 million
devices, the chief justice wrote. It did not matter, he wrote, that the records were in the
hands of a third party. That aspect of the ruling was a significant break from earlier
decisions.
The Constitution must take account of vast technological changes, Chief Justice
Roberts wrote, noting that digital data can provide a comprehensive, detailed — and
intrusive — overview of private affairs that would have been impossible to imagine not
long ago.
The decision made exceptions for emergencies like bomb threats and child abductions.
”Such exigencies,” he wrote, ”include the need to pursue a fleeing suspect, protect
individuals who are threatened with imminent harm or prevent the imminent destruction
of evidence.”
In general, though, the authorities must now seek a warrant for cell tower location
information and, the logic of the decision suggests, other kinds of digital data that
provide a detailed look at a person’s private life.
The decision thus has implications for all kinds of personal information held by third
parties, including email and text messages, internet searches, and bank and credit card
records. But Chief Justice Roberts said the ruling had limits.
”We hold only that a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a
legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party,” the chief justice wrote. The
court’s four more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer,
Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — joined his opinion.
Each of the four other justices wrote a dissent, with the five opinions running to more
than 110 pages. In one dissent, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the distinctions drawn
by the majority were illogical and ”will frustrate principled application of the Fourth
Amendment in many routine yet vital law enforcement operations.”
”Cell-site records,” he wrote, ”are uniquely suited to help the government develop
probable cause to apprehend some of the nation’s most dangerous criminals: serial
killers, rapists, arsonists, robbers and so forth.”
In a second dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the decision ”guarantees a
blizzard of litigation while threatening many legitimate and valuable investigative
practices upon which law enforcement has rightfully come to rely.”
The case, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402, arose from armed robberies of Radio
Shacks and other stores in the Detroit area starting in 2010.
Witnesses said that Timothy Ivory Carpenter had planned the robberies, supplied guns
and served as lookout, typically waiting in a stolen car across the street.
”At his signal, the robbers entered the store, brandished their guns, herded customers
and employees to the back, and ordered the employees to fill the robbers’ bags with
new smartphones,” a court decision said, summarizing the evidence against him.
Prosecutors also relied on months of records obtained from cellphone companies to
prove their case. The records showed that Mr. Carpenter’s phone had been nearby
when several of the robberies happened. He was convicted and sentenced to 116 years
in prison.
Mr. Carpenter’s lawyers said cellphone companies had turned over 127 days of records
that placed his phone at 12,898 locations, based on information from cellphone towers.
The records disclosed whether he had slept at home on given nights and whether he
attended his usual church on Sunday mornings.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the information was entitled to privacy protection.
”Mapping a cellphone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an allencompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts,” he wrote, going on to quote from an
earlier opinion. ”As with GPS information, the time-stamped data provides an intimate
window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through
them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.”’
In dissent, Justice Kennedy wrote that GPS devices provide much more precise location
information than do cell towers. Chief Justice Roberts responded that cell tower
technology is developing quickly.
”As the number of cell sites has proliferated,” he wrote, ”the geographic area covered
by each cell sector has shrunk, particularly in urban areas. In addition, with new
technology measuring the time and angle of signals hitting their towers, wireless carriers
already have the capability to pinpoint a phone’s location within 50 meters.”
Chief Justice Roberts left open the question of whether limited government requests for
location data required a warrant. But he said that access to seven days of data is
enough to raise Fourth Amendment concerns.
The legal question for the justices was whether prosecutors violated the Fourth
Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches, by collecting without warrant vast
amounts of data from cellphone companies that showed Mr. Carpenter’s movements.
In a pair of recent decisions, the Supreme Court expressed discomfort with allowing
unlimited government access to digital data. In United States v. Jones, it limited the
ability of the police to use GPS devices to track suspects’ movements. And in Riley v.
California, it required a warrant to search cellphones.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that both decisions supported the result in the new case.
As his opinion in Riley pointed out, he wrote, ”cellphones and the services they provide
are ‘such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life’ that carrying one is indispensable to
participation in modern society.”
And the Jones decision, he wrote, addressed digital privacy in the context of location
information.
”The question we confront today,” he wrote, ”is how to apply the Fourth Amendment to
a new phenomenon: the ability to chronicle a person’s past movements through the
record of his cellphone signals. Such tracking partakes of many of the qualities of the
GPS monitoring we considered in Jones. Much like GPS tracking of a vehicle, cellphone
location information is detailed, encyclopedic and effortlessly compiled.”
Technology companies including Apple, Facebook and Google filed a brief urging the
Supreme Court to continue to bring Fourth Amendment law into the modern era. ”No
constitutional doctrine should presume,” the brief said, ”that consumers assume the risk
of warrantless government surveillance simply by using technologies that are beneficial
and increasingly integrated into modern life.”
Older Supreme Court decisions offered little protection for information about businesses’
customers. In 1979, for instance, in Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court ruled that a
robbery suspect had no reasonable expectation that his right to privacy extended to the
numbers dialed from his landline phone. The court reasoned that the suspect had
voluntarily turned over that information to a third party: the phone company.
Relying on the Smith decision’s ”third-party doctrine,” federal appeals courts have said
that government investigators seeking data from cellphone companies showing users’
movements do not require a warrant.
But Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the doctrine is of limited use in the digital age.
”While the third-party doctrine applies to telephone numbers and bank records, it is not
clear whether its logic extends to the qualitatively different category of cell-site records,”
he wrote. ”After all, when Smith was decided in 1979, few could have imagined a
society in which a phone goes wherever its owner goes, conveying to the wireless
carrier not just dialed digits, but a detailed and comprehensive record of the person’s
movements.”
”When the government tracks the location of a cellphone,” the chief justice wrote, ”it
achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s
user.”
A federal law, the Stored Communications Act, does require prosecutors to go to court
to obtain tracking data, but the showing they must make under the law is not probable
cause, the standard for a warrant. Instead, they must demonstrate only that there were
”specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe”
that the records sought ”are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
That was insufficient, the court ruled. But Chief Justice Roberts emphasized the limits of
the decision. It did not address real-time cell tower data, he wrote, ”or call into question
conventional surveillance techniques and tools, such as security cameras.”
”Nor do we address other business records that might incidentally reveal location
information,” the chief justice wrote. ”Further, our opinion does not consider other
collection techniques involving foreign affairs or national security.”
Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter: @adamliptak.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: The Supreme Court’s decision will protect ”deeply revealing” records
associated with 400 million electronic devices. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM
BRENNER/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (A16)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Liptak, Adam. “Warrant Required for Cellphone Tracking Data.” New York Times, 23 June
2018, p. A1(L). Business Collection,
http://link.galegroup.com.libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/apps/doc/A543973598/
GPS?u=oran95108&sid=GPS&xid=083fe50b. Accessed 27 Apr. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543973598
OCTOBER TERM, 2017
(Slip Opinion)
1
Syllabus
NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is
being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been
prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.
See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321, 337.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus
CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR
THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
No. 16–402.
Argued November 29, 2017—Decided June 22, 2018
Cell phones perform their wide and growing variety of functions by continuously connecting to a set of radio antennas called “cell sites.”
Each time a phone connects to a cell site, it generates a time-stamped
record known as cell-site location information (CSLI). Wireless carriers collect and store this information for their own business purposes.
Here, after the FBI identified the cell phone numbers of several robbery suspects, prosecutors were granted court orders to obtain the
suspects’ cell phone records under the Stored Communications Act.
Wireless carriers produced CSLI for petitioner Timothy Carpenter’s
phone, and the Government was able to obtain 12,898 location points
cataloging Carpenter’s movements over 127 days—an average of 101
data points per day. Carpenter moved to suppress the data, arguing
that the Government’s seizure of the records without obtaining a
warrant supported by probable cause violated the Fourth Amendment. The District Court denied the motion, and prosecutors used
the records at trial to show that Carpenter’s phone was near four of
the robbery locations at the time those robberies occurred. Carpenter was convicted. The Sixth Circuit affirmed, holding that Carpenter lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location information collected by the FBI because he had shared that information
with his wireless carriers.
Held:
1. The Government’s acquisition of Carpenter’s cell-site records
was a Fourth Amendment search. Pp. 4–18.
(a) The Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests
but certain expectations of privacy as well. Katz v. United States, 389
U. S. 347, 351. Thus, when an individual “seeks to preserve something as private,” and his expectation of privacy is “one that society is
2
CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES
Syllabus
prepared to recognize as reasonable,” official intrusion into that
sphere generally qualifies as a search and requires a warrant supported by probable cause. Smith v. Maryland, 442 U. S. 735, 740 (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted). The analysis regarding which expectations of privacy are entitled to protection is
informed by historical understandings “of what was deemed an unreasonable search and seizure when [the Fourth Amendment] was
adopted.” Carroll v. United States, 267 U. S. 132, 149. These Founding-era understandings continue to inform this Court when applying
the Fourth Amendment to innovations in surveillance tools. See, e.g.,
Kyllo v. United States, 533 U. S. 27. Pp. 4–7.
(b) The digital data at issue—personal location information
maintained by a third party—does not fit neatly under existing precedents but lies at the intersection of two lines of cases. One set addresses a person’s expectation of privacy in his physical location and
movements. See, e.g., United States v. Jones, 565 U. S. 400 (five Justices concluding that privacy concerns would be raised by GPS tracking). The other addresses a person’s expectation of privacy in information voluntarily turned over to third parties. See United States v.
Miller, 425 U. S. 435 (no expectation of privacy in financial records
held by a bank), and Smith, 442 U. S. 735 (no expectation of privacy
in records of dialed telephone numbers conveyed to telephone company). Pp. 7–10.
(c) Tracking a person’s past movements through CSLI partakes
of many of the qualities of GPS monitoring considered in Jones—it is
detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled. At the same time,
however, the fact that the individual continuously reveals his location to his wireless carrier implicates the third-party principle of
Smith and Miller. Given the unique nature of cell-site records, this
Court declines to extend Smith and Miller to cover them. Pp. 10–18.
(1) A majority of the Court has already recognized that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their
physical movements. Allowing government access to cell-site records—which “hold for many Americans the ‘privacies of life,’ ” Riley v.
California, 573 U. S. ___, ___—contravenes that expectation. In fact,
historical cell-site records present even greater privacy concerns than
the GPS monitoring considered in Jones: They give the Government
near perfect surveillance and allow it to travel back in time to retrace
a person’s whereabouts, subject only to the five-year retention policies of most wireless carriers. The Government contends that CSLI
data is less precise than GPS information, but it thought the data accurate enough here to highlight it during closing argument in Carpenter’s trial. At any rate, the rule the Court adopts “must take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in
Cite as: 585 U. S. ____ (2018)
3
Syllabus
development,” Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 36, and the accuracy of CSLI is
rapidly approaching GPS-level precision. Pp. 12–15.
(2) The Government contends that the third-party doctrine
governs this case, because cell-site records, like the records in Smith
and Miller, are “business records,” created and maintained by wireless carriers. But there is a world of difference between the limited
types of personal information addressed in Smith and Miller and the
exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by
wireless carriers.
The third-party doctrine partly stems from the notion that an individual has a reduced expectation of privacy in information knowingly
shared with another. Smith and Miller, however, did not rely solely
on the act of sharing. They also considered “the nature of the particular documents sought” and limitations on any “legitimate ‘expectation of privacy’ concerning their contents.” Miller, 425 U. S., at 442.
In mechanically applying the third-party doctrine to this case the
Government fails to appreciate the lack of comparable limitations on
the revealing nature of CSLI.
Nor does the second rationale for the third-party doctrine—
voluntary exposure—hold up when it comes to CSLI. Cell phone location information is not truly “shared” as the term is normally understood. First, cell phones and the services they provide are “such a
pervasive and insistent part of daily life” that carrying one is indispensable to participation in modern society. Riley, 573 U. S., at ___.
Second, a cell phone logs a cell-site record by dint of its operation,
without any affirmative act on the user’s part beyond powering up.
Pp. 15–17.
(d) This decision is narrow. It does not express a view on matters
not before the Court; does not disturb the application of Smith and
Miller or call into question conventional surveillance techniques and
tools, such as security cameras; does not address other business records that might incidentally reveal location information; and does not
consider other collection techniques involving foreign affairs or national security. Pp. 17–18.
2. The Government did not obtain a warrant supported by probable cause before acquiring Carpenter’s cell-site records. It acquired
those records pursuant to a court order under the Stored Communications Act, which required the Government to show “reasonable
grounds” for believing that the records were “relevant and material to
an ongoing investigation.” 18 U. S. C. §2703(d). That showing falls
well short of the probable cause required for a warrant. Consequently, an order issued under §2703(d) is not a permissible mechanism for
accessing historical cell-site records. Not all orders compelling the
production of documents will require a showing of probable cause. A
4
CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES
Syllabus
warrant is required only in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party. And even
though the Government will generally need a warrant to access
CSLI, case-specific exceptions—e.g., exigent circumstances—may
support a warrantless search. Pp. 18–22.
819 F. 3d 880, reversed and remanded.
ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which GINSBREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., joined. KENNEDY, J., filed a
dissenting opinion, in which THOMAS and ALITO, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J.,
filed a dissenting opinion. ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which
THOMAS, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed a dissenting opinion.
BURG,
Cite as: 585 U. S. ____ (2018)
1
Opinion of the Court
NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
preliminary print of the United States Reports. Readers are requested to
notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order
that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 16–402
_________________
TIMOTHY IVORY CARPENTER, PETITIONER v.
UNITED STATES
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT
[June 22, 2018]
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the
Court.
This case presents the question whether the Government conducts a search under the Fourth Amendment
when it accesses historical cell phone records that provide
a comprehensive chronicle of the user’s past movements.
I
A
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