State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Will the Supreme Court Take Up Cellphone Surveillance?

Route Fifty: Statistically speaking, you’re most likely reading this story on a cellphone somewhere in the United States. If you are, you’re using one of more than 378 million cellphone accounts in the country. The data forming these words is beaming to your phone by way of between 300,000 and 600,000 cell towers—a vast telecommunications archipelago that spans from Seattle to Orlando, binding Americans and their devices to one another in a tangled digital web.

Traversing that web leaves tracks. By tracing the cell towers an individual device interacts with, law-enforcement agencies can track where you’ve been, how long you were there, and when you left. What’s more, the police can obtain all of that data without a warrant. But that could change if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to take up two major Fourth Amendment cases, Graham v. United States and Carpenter v. United States, for its upcoming term in October.

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