California Senate OKs requiring warrants to search smartphones, tablets
Patrick McGreevy / Los Angeles Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This June 2015 Senate vote is the legislative first step behind what became S.B. 178, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which Governor Brown signed that October to require warrants before police access digital records. It sits inside a broader California run on device policy that same year — the state had just put a smartphone 'kill switch' law into effect weeks earlier.
What makes the vote durable is how far the warrant principle traveled afterward: courts kept tightening the screws on law enforcement well past enactment.
First-order effects
- If enacted, California police lose the ability to search smartphones and tablets without first convincing a judge — device contents move into the same warrant regime as physical property.
Second-order effects
- Prosecutors and police agencies have to build warrant applications for digital evidence as routine practice, pushing the question of what counts as a 'search' into the courts.
Third-order effects
- Courts answered by extending protection past the statute: a district judge later ruled that even a warrant does not let authorities force suspects to unlock devices via biometrics, and another held that merely viewing a phone's lockscreen qualifies as a search. The pattern points toward judicially enforced digital privacy outpacing what legislatures wrote down — a structural narrowing of police access to devices regardless of statutory text.
The trend: California is codifying warrant requirements for digital data while courts progressively extend device-privacy protections beyond what any single statute requires.