Carpenter v. United States: Digital Privacy in the 21st Century

摘要

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Carpenter is a narrow one. The court did not express a view on matters not before it: real-time CSLI or "tower dumps" (a download of information on all the devices that connected to a particular cell site during a particular interval). As the late Justice Felix Frankfurter noted when considering new innovations in airplanes and radios, the court must tread carefully in such cases, to ensure that we do not "embarrass the future." Having found that the acquisition of Carpenter's CSLI was a search, the Supreme Court merely held that the government must generally obtain a warrant supported by probable cause before acquiring such records.