I recently came across an interesting Fourth Amendment case in which a district court judge ruled that a defendant has no privacy rights in the list of phone numbers stored inside his cell phone: United States v. Fierros-Alavarez, 547 F. Supp.2d 1206 (D. Kan. 2008). This conclusion is wrong, I think, and why it’s wrong raises an interesting aspect of Fourth Amendment law.
The facts of the case are simple. The defendant was arrested and taken into custody, and a cell phone was taken from him at the time. The next day, the officers began to suspect that the cell phone stored records of criminal activity. Specifically, the officers believed that the defendant was a participant in a narcotics conspiracy, and that there would be records of calls to other members of the conspiracy inside the phone. Acting without a warrant, an officer searched three parts of the phone:
He looked at its