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US police must obtain a warrant to search a suspect’s smartphone after the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that constitutional privacy protections apply to the often extensive data people keep on the devices in their pockets.
美国最高法院(US Supreme Court)周三裁定，那些装在人们口袋里的设备上存储的大量数据也适用宪法隐私保护条款。今后，美国警方必须取得授权才能搜查嫌疑人的智能手机。
In a unanimous ruling praised by privacy campaigners, the court decided that searching a smartphone was more like downloading the contents of a computer than leafing through someone’s address book.
该法院一致做出的这一裁决得到了隐私保护人士的赞扬。在这一裁决中，美国最高法院认定，对智能手机的搜查更像是从电脑上下载内容，而不是翻翻某人的电话本。
The fourth amendment bans “unreasonable searches and seizures” but police are usually allowed to search the personal belongings a suspect is carrying. Lower courts had been divided on whether to ban searches of smartphones without a warrant.
美国宪法第四修正案禁止“无理搜查和扣押”，不过通常美国警方搜查嫌犯携带的个人物品是允许的。而对于是否应禁止在无授权情况下搜查智能手机中的内容，美国下级法院始终存在分歧。
Chief Justice John Roberts said the “immense storage capacity” of smartphones made them different from anything else a suspect is holding.
首席法官约翰•罗伯茨(John Roberts)表示，智能手机的“巨大存储量”令其有别于嫌犯携带的其他任何物品。
“Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life’,” he wrote. “The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
他写道：“当代手机并不仅仅是又一种技术上的便利工具。以所存储和可能泄露的内容而言，对许多美国人来说，它们就是‘生活隐私’的载体。如今，科技的发展令个人可以将这类信息带在手中，但这并不代表这些信息的保护价值有任何减少——这种保护正是我们的建国者曾为之奋斗过的。”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights campaign group, described the ruling as “groundbreaking”. Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney, said: “This should have implications for other forms of government electronic searches and surveillance, tightening the rules for police behaviour and preserving our privacy rights in our increasingly digital world.”
该案源于两起警方搜查电话的事件。在“赖利诉加利福尼亚州案”(Riley v California)中，警方在一个智能手机上发现了能够证明嫌疑人有罪的照片及其他信息，这些内容能将嫌疑人与一起枪击案联系起来，州法院表示这么做是合法的。然而波士顿发生的另一个案件却得出了相反的结论，在该案中嫌疑人普通功能电话（不是智能电话）上的一个通话记录被用来推断他的居住地。该案中的这一证据被联邦上诉法庭排除。
The Constitutional Accountability Center, which like the EFF filed a brief in the case, said it was a good day for the “Bill of Rights”. Doug Kendall, CAC president, said searching cell phones without a warrant was “even more intrusive” than “similar searches of colonial-era homes, which the Founders fought against in the Revolutionary War”.
美国最高法院驳回了加州一案中的判决。
The case originated from two incidents where police searched phones. In Riley v California, police found incriminating photos and other information on a smartphone connecting a suspect to a shooting, which state courts said was legal. But another case in Boston reached the opposite conclusion, where a call on a suspect’s feature phone (not as advanced as a smartphone) was used to discover where he lived. The evidence in that case was thrown out by a federal appeals court.
罗伯茨表示，这一裁决对于执法机构打击犯罪的能力可能会有影响。他写道：“手机已成为犯罪团伙成员协调和沟通的重要辅助工具，能够提供极有价值的危险罪行定罪信息。但保护隐私还是要付出代价的。”
