The unanimous ruling will, almost definitely, also apply to laptops and tablets and it could apply to home and business searches as well as information held by phone companies and other third parties. Orin S Kerr, law professor at George Washington University, said: ‘This is a bold opinion. It is the first computer-search case, and it says we are in a new digital age. You can’t apply the old rules anymore.’
Revulsion
Giving the court’s opinion, Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr linked the decision to a crucial stage in US history. One of the reasons for the American Revolution, he wrote, was a revulsion against the ‘general warrants’ which ‘allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity’. Source: New York Times
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