The easy mobility, storage capacity and varied features of handheld communications devices like smartphones increase our efficiency and access to the ever-changing information superhighway. But, ironically, their mobile and anonymous character enhances criminal endeavors, including the ability to traverse historic jurisdictional boundaries, thereby complicating jurisdictional legal norms. In determining the legality of warrants targeting particular digital communications, the courts are more frequently facing jurisdictional challenges. A court’s power to issue a warrant for such digital communications that may take place outside of the court’s ostensible territorial jurisdiction have arisen with more frequency with varying results, which will be addressed in this article.
In 1976, a national commission created by Congress to report on the use and value of court-approved electronic surveillance described in their report the critical nature of law enforcement’s ability to combat organized crime through electronic surveillance.1 Indeed, the sentiments were echoed in 2000 by Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt of the New York Court of Appeals in People v. Darling, when he referred to electronic surveillance as an essential law enforcement tool that in its absence some criminal activity—often the most pernicious—would go undetected and unpunished.2 Fifty years ago, the hardline telephone was the communications device by choice and necessity. Today, with a varied assortment of digital devices to choose from, there are over 327 million cell phones in use in the United States.3 This shift from hardline telephone to mobile digital device challenges the historic jurisdictional limitations of fixed borders that until recently was an easily determined bright line in practice in the criminal courts of our nation.
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