“Three can keep
a secret if two of them are dead.”
Benjamin Franklin’s famous idiom, in essence, alludes to the fact that
our most intimate secrets may never be safe in the hands of another. In the age of the “Digital Revolution,”
however, is our intimate information really safe in our own hands? 91% of adult American’s own cell phones today, and as the technology becomes
more sophisticated, so does our use of it.
Thumbing through our phones is no longer about a list of names and
numbers, it has evolved into much more sensitive information. Our phones have become an extension of
ourselves and contain information including emails, photos, and GPS data.
Consequently, modern technology has courts struggling
to apply a search-incident-to-arrest jurisprudence that was developed before
the dawn of the digital era to the question of whether the Fourth Amendment permits warrantless searches of data on a cell phone seized from
an individual.[1] Accordingly, the Supreme Court has granted
certiorari in a set of pivotal constitutional privacy rights cases.
