NPR – “A Supreme Court case, a big one for cellphone users, examines whether police must obtain a warrant in order to get historical cell-site location information from cellphone providers.”

SCOTUSBlog: Argument analysis: Drawing a line on privacy for cellphone records, but where? The Supreme Court heard oral argument this morning in an important privacy-rights case. The defendant in the case, Timothy Carpenter, was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison for his role in a series of armed robberies in Indiana and Michigan. At his trial, prosecutors introduced Carpenter’s cellphone records, which confirmed that his cellphone connected with cell towers in the vicinity of the robberies. Carpenter argued that prosecutors could not use the cellphone records against him because they had not gotten a warrant for them, but the lower courts disagreed. Today the Supreme Court seemed more sympathetic, although they were clearly uncertain about exactly what to do. As Justice Stephen Breyer put it at one point, “This is an open box. We know not where we go…The transcript in Carpenter v. United States is available on the Supreme Court’s website.”