03/02/2020 Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473 - Supreme Court 2014 - Google Scholar arrest and accusation have been discovered, and the law is in the act of subjecting the body of the accused to its physical dominion." 414 U.S., at 232, 94 S.Ct. 467 (quoting People v. Chiagles, 237 N.Y. 193, 197, 142 N.E. 583, 584 (1923)); see also 414 U.S., at 237, 94 S.Ct. 467 (Powell, J., concurring) ("an individual lawfully subjected to a custodial arrest retains no significant Fourth Amendment interest in the privacy of his person"). Put simply, a patdown of Robinson's clothing and an inspection of the cigarette pack found in his pocket constituted only minor additional intrusions compared to the substantial government authority exercised in taking Robinson into custody. See Chadwick, 433 U.S., at 16, n. 10, 97 S.Ct. 2476 (searches of a person are justified in part by "reduced expectations of privacy caused by the arrest"). The fact that an arrestee has diminished privacy interests does not mean that the Fourth Amendment falls out of the picture entirely. Not every search "is acceptable solely because a person is in custody." Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. ___, ___, 133 S.Ct. 1958, 1979, 186 L.Ed.2d 1 (2013). To the contrary, when "privacy-related concerns are weighty enough" a "search may require a warrant, notwithstanding the diminished expectations of privacy of the arrestee." Ibid. One such example, of course, is Chimel. Chimel refused to "characteriz[e] the invasion of privacy that results from a top-to-bottom search of a man's house as `minor.'" 395 U.S., at 766-767, n. 12, 89 S.Ct. 2034. Because a search of the arrestee's entire house was a substantial invasion beyond the arrest itself, the Court concluded that a warrant was required. Robinson is the only decision from this Court applying Chimel to a search of the contents of an item found on an arrestee's person. In an earlier case, this Court had approved a search of a zipper bag carried by an arrestee, but the Court analyzed only the validity of the arrest itself. See Draper v. United States, 358 U.S. 307, 310-311, 79 S.Ct. 329, 3 L.Ed.2d 327 (1959). Lower courts applying Robinson and Chimel, however, have approved searches of a variety of personal items carried by an arrestee. See, e.g., United States v. Carrion, 809 F.2d 1120, 1123, 1128 (C.A.5 1987) (billfold and address book); United States v. Watson, 669 F.2d 1374, 1383-1384 (C.A.11 1982) (wallet); United States v. Lee, 501 F.2d 890, 892 (C.A.D.C.1974) (purse). The United States asserts that a search of all data stored on a cell phone is "materially indistinguishable" from searches of these sorts of physical items. Brief for United States in No. 13-212, p. 26. That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else 2489 justifies lumping them together. Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those *2489 implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse. A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee's pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but any extension of that reasoning to digital data has to rest on its own bottom. 1 Cell phones differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense from other objects that might be kept on an arrestee's person. The term "cell phone" is itself misleading shorthand; many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers. One of the most notable distinguishing features of modern cell phones is their immense storage capacity. Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy. See Kerr, Foreword: Accounting for Technological Change, 36 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 403, 404-405 (2013). Most people cannot lug around every piece of mail they have received for the past several months, every picture they have taken, or every book or article they have read — nor would they have any reason to attempt to do so. And if they did, they would have to drag behind them a trunk of the sort held to require a search warrant in Chadwick, supra, rather than a container the size of the cigarette package in Robinson. But the possible intrusion on privacy is not physically limited in the same way when it comes to cell phones. The current top-selling smart phone has a standard capacity of 16 gigabytes (and is available with up to 64 gigabytes). Sixteen gigabytes translates to millions of pages of text, thousands of pictures, or hundreds of videos. See Kerr, supra, at 404; Brief for Center for Democracy & Technology et al. as Amici Curiae 7-8. Cell phones couple that capacity with the ability to store many different types of information: Even the most basic phones that sell for less than $20 might hold photographs, picture messages, text messages, Internet browsing history, a calendar, a thousand-entry phone book, and so on. See id., at 30; United States v. Flores-Lopez, 670 F.3d 803, 806 (C.A.7 2012). We expect that the gulf between physical practicability and digital capacity will only continue to widen in the future. The storage capacity of cell phones has several interrelated consequences for privacy. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information — an address, a note, a prescription, a bank statement, a video — that reveal https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9647156672357738355&q=riley+v.+california&hl=en&as_sdt=2006 7/13