THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

For all the people who thought this one vital amendment was on life support and Cheeto Mussolini was ready to pull the plug, SCOTUS has given us a ray of hope that it will last a little longer. In a 5-4 decision the Court decided that only China can track your phone with impunity, all else need a warrant.

In a major statement on privacy in the digital age, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government generally needs a warrant to collect troves of location data about the customers of cellphone companies.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.

The 5-to-4 decision has implications for all kinds of personal information held by third parties, including email and text messages, internet searches, and bank and credit card records. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the ruling was limited.

“We hold only that a warrant is required in the rare case where the suspect has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party,” the chief justice wrote. The court’s four more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — joined his opinion.

Each of the four other justices wrote a dissent, with the five opinions running to more than 120 pages. In one dissent, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the distinctions drawn by the majority were illogical and “will frustrate principled application of the Fourth Amendment in many routine yet vital law enforcement operations.”

“Cell-site records,” he wrote, “are uniquely suited to help the government develop probable cause to apprehend some of the nation’s most dangerous criminals: serial killers, rapists, arsonists, robbers, and so forth.”

In a second dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the decision “guarantees a blizzard of litigation while threatening many legitimate and valuable investigative practices upon which law enforcement has rightfully come to rely.”

The case, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402, arose from armed robberies of Radio Shacks and other stores in the Detroit area starting in 2010.

Prosecutors also relied on months of records obtained from cellphone companies to prove their case. The records showed that Mr. Carpenter’s phone had been nearby when several of the robberies happened. He was convicted and sentenced to 116 years in prison.

Mr. Carpenter’s lawyers said cellphone companies had turned over 127 days of records that placed his phone at 12,898 locations, based on information from cellphone towers. The records disclosed whether he had slept at home on given nights and whether he attended his usual church on Sunday mornings.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the information was entitled to privacy protection.

“Mapping a cell phone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts,” he wrote, going on to quote from an earlier opinion. “As with GPS information, the timestamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’ ”

One small step for America, one bump in the road for the police state.