Today's 9-0 ruling that the police need a search warrant to look at your cell phones seems like a big win at first, but the devil is in the detail. Politico is a good case in point. The headline is:
SCOTUS rules warrants needed for cellphone search
But in the very first sentence of the story, a weasel word comes into play:
The Supreme Court struck a major blow in favor of digital privacy Wednesday by ruling unanimously that police generally need a warrant before searching the cellphone or personal electronic device of a person arrested.
The qualifier "generally" pops right out of that sentence. It means that special circumstances exist where a warrant is NOT required. So, when would that be?
The court’s opinion explicitly leaves open the opportunity for police to search a cellphone without a warrant in “exigent circumstances,” such as a ticking-bomb scenario or when there’s reason to believe evidence is about to be destroyed.
So, we have two examples of when they can search without a warrant. Everybody's favorite TV/movie trope, the "ticking bomb scenario" which happens a lot in conservative documentaries like
24, and when there's a
reason to believe evidence is about to be destroyed.
Please note the absence of an adjective such as "plausible" in front of "reason".
So, to search a phone without a warrant, you simply have to have a "reason to believe" evidence is about to be destroyed.
Any reason will do.
And before anyone tells me how any "sensible" person would parse that ruling, I would point out that it is now legal to torture people in this country and to assassinate American citizens without trial.