警察没有搜查证能不能检查你的手机

    假如你在美国某个法律不允许吸大麻的州里因为拿着一支大麻烟而被警方逮捕了，那么警察是否有权在没有搜查证的情况下随意搜查你的iPhone或Android手机？假如你的手机里有大概16GB的个人信息，比如电子邮件、短信、通讯录、日历、照片、视频和GPS记录呢？

    这是美国最高法院上周二受理的两起案件中反映出的一个根本问题。其中一起案件与加利弗尼亚州的一起涉黑枪击案有关，另一起案件则是一名波士顿男子贩卖可卡因的联邦案件。

    自从2011年以来，加利福尼亚州高级法院为警方开了绿灯，允许他们在“可能导致逮捕嫌疑人”的情况下搜查嫌疑人手机。但是美国第一巡回区上诉法院（主要负责缅因州、马萨诸塞州、波多黎各以及罗德岛的联邦上述案件）的一个陪审团却于去年五月明确裁定，禁止警方在无搜查证的情况下搜查他人手机。因此，法院必须在今年六月末任期结束前解决这个法律冲突。

    自从美国建国以来，拥有逮捕权的警员历来有权在没有搜查证的情况下搜查被拘捕人的任何随身物品，甚至包括有权打开嫌疑人随身携带的信封、容器，以及搜查其笔记本、记事簿或者钱包等。这些物品中含有的私人信息与如今储存在手机里的信息并没有本质上的区别。

    但是上文提到的这两起案件的辩护律师却得了众多民权组织和机构的支持——比如历来比较激进的美国民权同盟（American Civil Liberties Union）和一向鼓吹自由主义的加图研究院（Cato Institute）。这些律师指出，鉴于当代数码设备巨大的存储能力，以及如今手机中储存的各类公民信息所具有的高度敏感性，传统的法律法规也到了该修改的时候了。

    耶鲁大学法学院（Yale Law School）教授尤金•菲德尔和私人律师安德鲁•平克斯在他们为民主与科技中心（the Center for Democracy and Technology）和电子前沿基金会（the Electronic Frontier Foundation）所撰写的一份声明中指出：“科技的发展使人们现在能够每天随身携带海量的信息。数码科技问世以前，这类信息都是储藏在家庭的抽屉或文件柜里。那时执法部门必须先获得搜查证才能搜查这些资料。” （平克斯同时也是美亚博律师事务所的一名合伙人。）

    16GB恰恰是苹果iPhone 5最小容量版本的存储量。菲德尔和平卡斯说：“16GB意味着它可以储存8亿个单词的文本——如果是一本书的话，它的厚度比一个足球场长度还长，如果写在纸张上，要16辆大卡车才能拉得完。”（iPhone 5也有32GB和64GB版，但是其它厂商最高能够提供内存为128GB的手机。）

    宪法责任中心（the Constitutional Accountability Center）的道格•肯德尔和伊利莎白•维德拉在一份非当事人意见陈述中指出，如今警察不需要搜查证便可搜查嫌疑人的手机，这种行为很像英国殖民时期英国当局颁发的臭名昭著的“通用搜查状”和“协助搜查走私物品令”——它们也正是美国宪法《第四修正案》（the Fourth Amendment）的修宪者一心想要制止的罪恶。卡德尔和维德拉说：“‘通用搜查状’和‘协助搜查走私物品令’缺乏对需要搜查的人或物的任何具体说明，也没有针对任何具体的犯罪嫌疑。”因此，为了避免这种无理搜查和扣押，《第四修正案》明确规定，“所有搜查不仅仅必须是合理的，另外所有搜查证还必须‘特别说明搜查的地点和扣押的人或物’。”

    （《第四修正案》原文写道：“人民的人身、住宅、文件和财产不受无理搜查和扣押的权利，不得侵犯。除依照合理根据，以宣誓或代誓宣言保证，并具体说明搜查地点和扣押的人或物，否则不得发出搜查和扣押状。”）

    不过执法部门却非常希望保留传统的法规，也就是给予执行逮捕的警务人员以无限制地搜查嫌疑人随身物品的权力。美国司法部副部长小唐纳德•威瑞利指出，这个历史法规“主要旨在‘通过逮捕造成较少的隐私预期’。小唐纳德•威瑞利在联邦法院审理布里马•武里一案中代表美国政府一方参与了诉讼，另外还在加利福利亚州法院审理大卫•里昂•赖利一案中扮演了所谓“法庭之友”的角色。

    威瑞利认为：“这项传统法规也符合警务工作的实际。在实践中，我们不可能指望警务人员在执行拘捕的过程中对嫌疑人的随身物品逐件进行法律分析……当今世界，手机极有可能承裁了不法行为的证据，能够帮助执法人员确认他们已经拘捕的嫌疑人。”

    威瑞利还说：“与其它载体不一样的是，嫌疑人被拘捕后，他们手机里的内容仍然可以被销毁或隐匿，因此警方事后再想去追回这些重要证据几乎是不可能的，也是不切实际的。”这里他指的是落网嫌疑人的共犯可能使用一种“远程擦除”技术毁掉手机上储存的可用作证据的数据——这种技术本来的开发目的是为了防止手机被盗。

    Say you're arrested for possessing a marijuana cigarette in a state where that's still illegal. Can the arresting officer, without a warrant, riffle through your Apple (AAPL) iPhone or Google (GOOG) Android with impunity, inspecting, say, 16 gigabytes worth of emails, text messages, contacts, calendars, photos, videos, and GPS records of your comings-and-goings?

    That's the bottom-line question permeating two cases being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday -- one involving the prosecution of a California man for a gang-related shooting and the other, a federal case against a Boston man for selling crack cocaine.

    Since 2011, the California Supreme Court has greenlighted broad warrantless cellphone searches "incident to an arrest," while a split panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit -- which hears federal cases from Maine, Massachusetts, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island -- categorically forbade such searches last May. The Court will apparently be resolving this conflict before its current term ends in late June.

    Since the country's founding, an arresting officer has traditionally been permitted to search and inspect, without a warrant, anything found on the arrestee's person, even if that meant opening closed envelopes and containers, and flipping through the accused's notebooks, datebooks or wallets -- all containing private information that does not differ in kind from what is now stored on cellphones.

    But attorneys for the two defendants in these two cases -- backed by numerous constitutional and civil liberties groups, ranging from the progressive American Civil Liberties Union to the libertarian Cato Institute -- argue that the traditional rule needs to be revised in light of the massive storage capacity of modern digital devices and the extraordinary sensitivity of the private data citizens now routinely store there.

    "Technology now makes it possible for individuals to carry huge quantities of information with them every day," write Yale Law School professor Eugene Fidell and private attorney Andrew Pincus in a brief they've co-authored by the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Prior to the advent of digital technology, this information would have been stored in the drawers and file cabinets of people's homes," they write. "Law enforcement officers would have been required to obtain a warrant in order to search such materials." (Pincus is a partner with the Mayer Brown law firm.)

    A 16 gigabyte phone -- the smallest available storage capacity for the Apple iPhone 5 -- "can store 800 million words of text -- well over a football field's length of books or sixteen flat-bed truckloads of paper," Fidell and Pincus write. (The phone also comes in 32 GB and 64 GB versions, while other manufacturers offer up to 128 GM of memory, they note.)

    In light of this new reality, argue Doug Kendall and Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center in their amicus brief, today's warrantless cellphone searches incident to arrest closely resemble the reviled "general warrants" and "writs of assistance" that British authorities carried out during colonial times -- the precise evil the Framers of the Constitution sought to bar by enacting the Fourth Amendment. "These warrants and writs lacked any specificity about the people or items to be searched and were not predicated on any individualized suspicion," they write. To prevent such searches, the Fourth Amendment explicitly "required not only that all searches be reasonable, but also that all warrants 'particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.'"

    (The Fourth Amendment reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.")

    But law enforcement authorities urge preservation of the traditional rule, which gives arresting officers an unqualified right to inspect items found on the arrestee's person. This historical rule "rests primarily on the 'reduced expectations of privacy caused by the arrest,'" according to U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr. -- who represents the interests of the United States as a party in the federal case, United States v. Wurie, and as a so-called friend-of-the-court in the California case, Riley v. California.

    "The traditional rule also comports with the realities of police work," Verrilli argues, "in which officers cannot reasonably be expected to undertake an item-by-item legal analysis during arrests ... In today's world, cell phones are particularly likely to contain evidence of unlawful activity and to help law-enforcement officers identify suspects they have apprehended."

    "And unlike other containers," Verrilli continues, "their contents can be destroyed or concealed after the suspect is taken into custody, making it impossible or impracticable for the police ever to retrieve critical evidence." Here he is referring in part to the threat that a confederate of the arrested individual could use "remote wiping" technologies -- designed for people whose phones are stolen -- to destroy incriminating data saved on the phone.