Article from Reason by Damon Root.

It’s common to think of the U.S. Supreme Court in terms of liberal vs. conservative decisions, liberal vs. conservative doctrines, and liberal vs. conservative justices. But in the recent oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States, one of the biggest disagreements occurred between two of the Court’s conservative members, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

At issue in Carpenter v. U.S. is whether federal law enforcement officials violated the Fourth Amendment by acquiring the cell phone records of a suspected armed robber, Timothy Carpenter, without first obtaining a search warrant for those records. Thanks to the information they obtained, federal investigators were able to trace back Carpenter’s whereabouts during the time periods when several of his alleged crimes were committed, placing him in the vicinity of those crimes. That information was used against Carpenter in court.

The government insists that this warrantless search did not violate Carpenter’s Fourth Amendment rights because, in the words of the Supreme Court’s 1979 ruling in Smith v. Maryland, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” In other words, Carpenter has no Fourth Amendment right to privacy in his cell phone records because he voluntarily used his cell phone, thus voluntarily disclosing his location to the various cell phone towers that handled his calls.

Throughout the November 29 oral arguments, Justice Alito was perhaps the most supportive of the government’s position and the most critical of Carpenter’s arguments. Justice Gorsuch, on the other hand, seemed extremely skeptical of the government’s stance. Gorsuch even suggested at one point that the government’s position was at odds with the “original understanding of the Constitution”—not exactly a compliment, since Gorsuch is a self-professed originalist.

Read the entire article at Reason.