United States v. Graham
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2016
- Citation
- 824 F.3d 421 (4th Cir. 2016) (en banc)
- Standard applied
- Third-party doctrine applied to historical CSLI
What the court held
Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit held that a cell-phone user has no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell-site location information held by his carrier, so the government does not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when it obtains those records without a warrant. The panel decision, which had found a violation while applying good faith, was displaced.
Why
The court applied the third-party doctrine of Smith and Miller: an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily conveyed to a third party, and the doctrine does not turn on whether the user actively chose to share each detail or on the quantity of information involved. It drew a line between content and non-content records, and said expressly that the Supreme Court might later limit or eliminate the doctrine and Congress might require a warrant, but that it could not reach that result under controlling law.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Graham is included because it is the clearest statement of the law that Carpenter overturned two years later, and reading it shows how orthodox that position was — the court noted it was in line with every other federal appellate court to have considered the question. The lesson for a practitioner is about timing: evidence in older matters was collected under this rule, and the good-faith doctrine is what usually decides whether the change in law helps. It also shows the courts inviting the legislative fix that never came.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: CSLI · third-party doctrine · en banc · superseded by Carpenter
Cited 140times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on fourth amendment and privacy & surveillance
- United States v. JonesSupreme Court of the United States · 2012Attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle's movements constitutes a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Th…
- Riley v. CaliforniaSupreme Court of the United States · 2014Police generally may not search the digital contents of a cell phone seized incident to an arrest without a warrant. The search-incident-to-arrest exception, wh…
- Carpenter v. United StatesSupreme Court of the United States · 2018The government's acquisition of historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier is a Fourth Amendment search, and generally requires a warrant…
- United States v. WarshakCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit · 2010A subscriber has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of e-mails stored with, or sent or received through, a commercial internet service provider…
- In re Application of the United States for Historical Cell Site DataCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · 2013Court orders authorised by the Stored Communications Act compelling cell-phone service providers to produce subscribers' historical cell-site information are no…
- United States v. DavisCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit · 2015Sitting en banc, the Eleventh Circuit held that a court order under § 2703(d) of the Stored Communications Act compelling a telephone company to produce its bus…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.