Hey there What's Next readers! Law.com senior technology editor Ian Lopez here again filling in for your usual host, Ben Hancock. This week, we'll be dissecting a monumental SCOTUS decision and touring overseas legal tech hotbeds. Plus more on the potentially far-reaching effects of the crytocurrency class action against Ripple Labs. We'll be on break next week for the 4th of July (cue the fireworks). I'll be back the following week to deliver the latest and greatest at the intersection of law and technology. Until then, send your comments, suggestions and story ideas to [email protected] or find me on Twitter: @IanMichaelLopez. ➤ Would you like to receive What's Next as a weekly email? Sign up here.

1 Big Thing: Privacy, Technology and the Supreme Court

Carpenter v. U.S the majority decision and four dissents reveal quite a lot about the justices' views on where law meets technology Following on its rulings related to cellphone searches and GPS tracking Notably, we witness several justices addressing the relationship between technology and legal precedent Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. I checked in with Nathan Wessler, the ACLU attorney who argued on behalf of Carpenter,

“The majority opinion is the latest in a series of opinions that strongly recognizes that the Fourth Amendment has to be interpreted in ways that keep up with developments in technology. So the Chief Justice's opinion in this case looks a little bit like his opinion in Riley—the case about searching the content of cell phones from a couple of years ago. And in both decisions, the Court and Justice Roberts had recognized we can't just rotely extend pre-digital judicial precedents to digital age surveillance and search techniques. The language on that theme in the Carpenterdecision just couldn't be stronger. And I think in Justice Alito's dissent, we can see some real anxiety and disagreement about how to make those changes without throwing out entire sets of Fourth Amendment doctrine. He would stick with the old rules and is apparently willing to accept the consequences for privacy.

Justice Gorsuch's opinion is really interesting, too. It's styled as a dissent, but really it's a dissent in name only. Because he goes into great depth into his view of why the government investing in techniques raise concerns and how he thinks we could appropriately address those not through privacy principles but through more of a property based approach. He doesn't totally flesh out how that will look in future case, but he provides a lot of guidance going forward that I think will see a great number of legal challenges from defense attorneys and others that include sections that take Justice Gorsuch up on his invitation to raise that theory as well.”

A Greater Threat? Here's more from my interview with Wessler:

“The Carpenter decision holds that the police need a warrant to get someone's historical cell phone location data. But in doing so the court has created space for future cases to address what protections are necessary for all the other kinds of highly sensitive digital age data that's held by third party companies. That's everything from the content of our emails to information generated by GPS on our phones, whether its medical information or a record of everything we read on newspaper apps or fertility tracking data or so much more. Information about the state of our bodies being collected by a smartwatch or another wearable medical device, information about the interior of our home from internet of things devices, like a smart thermostat that knows when you're home and maybe what room you're in.