Police need wiretap order to monitor Facebook account, court rules
Christopher Hutton
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Police and prosecutors must receive wiretap approval if they wish to eavesdrop on a user’s Facebook account without evidence of them committing a crime, a New Jersey court ruled Thursday.
In a landmark case, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Facebook, deciding that a warrant was insufficient to track a user’s social media account and that a wiretap order would be required. New Jersey law enforcement had attempted to get Facebook to provide the content of two users’ accounts every 15 minutes for 30 days with just a warrant, which only requires probable cause to approve. The warrant was justified, the state argued, because the data would already technically be stored on Facebook’s servers and not a live feed of the user’s activities.
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The court dismissed the state’s argument, ruling that such an allowance would make New Jersey’s wiretap laws obsolete because “law enforcement today would never need to apply for a wiretap order to obtain future electronic communications from Facebook users’ accounts on an ongoing basis,” the court ruled.
Wiretap orders have a higher legal standard in New Jersey. The state requires law enforcement to have more justification for their decision, such as proving that other investigative methods would fail.
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Google and Microsoft, who joined the case as amici curiae, told the court that New Jersey is the only state where police have used warrants instead of wiretap orders to obtain the release of personal communications. Legal authorities in other states usually seek wiretap orders for such requests, the two companies argued.
Privacy advocates praised the ruling. “It’s great to see the New Jersey Supreme Court make clear that whenever the government seeks ongoing access to our private conversations, it must meet the heightened protections required under state law and the federal and state constitutions,” Jennifer Granick, a surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.