Supreme Court Cellphone Ruling Could Be a Harbinger For Curbs on Surveillance

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police officers may not search the cellphones of people they arrest without warrants yesterday. As The Washington Post's Craig Timberg writes, even though the National Security Agency is not mentioned in the opinion, the court's ruling could impact the future of government surveillance and the contours of digital-age privacy. Legal scholars noted that the opinion was unanimous and that the language was forceful that "the vast troves of information police can find in modern cellphones are no less worthy of constitutional protection than the private papers that Founding Fathers once kept locked in wooden file cabinets inside their homes," Timberg reports.