1 Figures title: 5 Civil Liberties and the Supreme Court Carpenter V. United States In what was a big criminal case in Detroit, several suspects cell phone locations were tracked to prove a drug rings activity. This was going on for several months with no warrant granted with probable cause. Carpenter and his legal team argued after his conviction and in the appeals court that this very action violated his fourth amendment right and should vacate his conviction. This appeal set up a long and important fight that took our courts into a crossroads with regards to digital right being a part of the fourth amendment. The Original Case and Information Seizure Carpenter was convicted back in 2013 for a string of burglaries in the Detroit area. The FBI obtained his locations through a seizure of his stored location data for past months. Almost 13,000 data points were obtained by the agency. These data points showed everything about his life in the timeframe received. Agents were able to tell when and where he slept, went to church and much more. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, “when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.” (Wessler, 2018). The only problem being this perfect surveillance was done without any warrants. This set up the argument that all of this was done against his fourth amendment right. The Fourth Amendment Right The fourth amendment states that we all have ”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” ("America’s Founding Documents", n.d.). At the time this was written there were no such things as cell phones, but our court system was tasked throughout this case to properly interpret its meaning regarding our security and privacy with cell phone use and data. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Carpenter in “Fourth Amendment must apply to records of such unprecedented breadth and sensitivity” ("America's Founding Documents", n.d.). By viewing someone’s mapped out timestamped locations we get to see very intimately where a person is going and quite possibly what they are doing, and when there are doing it. Not that we have things to hide for some of us, but I still think we are entitled to that level of privacy. FBI Claims no Right Infringement The Governments lawyers argues that when we share our information with a “third party” in this case the cellphone company that we forfeit our Fourth Amendment right for that information when doing so. That would mean that phone call information, text messages, and even our GPS data would no longer be our information to protect as it is shared with the cellphone company and that we.