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By Aaron Sankin on June 28, 2014
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that should matter to the over 90 percent of Americans who carry around cellphones. The court ruled that if a law enforcement officer wants to search your mobile device, they’re going to have to get a warrant first.
Writing for the unanimous majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued the virtually endless amount of personal information contained on the average smartphone should be granted far greater Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure than a police officer simply rifling through a suspect’s pockets to make sure they’re not hiding a gun in their jacket pocket.
“Modern cellphones are not just another technological convenience,” Roberts wrote. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
While the decision was hailed as a major milestone by electronic privacy advocates, in reality, the victory was only partial. Police officers who want to skim through someone’s text messages or browse their Tinder matches to ferret out illegal activity may have to first justify their need to do so to a judge. Border patrol agents, on the other hand, have to do no such thing.
For the millions of people, U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike, who cross into the United States each year, there are very few limitations for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when it comes to the agency’s ability to search those travelers’ electronic devices.
Based on CBP documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act-related lawsuit, between October of 2008 and June of 2010, over 6,500 people crossing a U.S. border had their electronic devices searched. Almost half were American citizens.
Anecdotally, instances of CBP agents searching the cell phones and computers of people crossing the border abound.
When On The Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and her family were detained after coming back into the United States after a wedding in Canada, their smartphones were searched. In an interview with Forbes, Canadian actor Chad Rook recounted how customs spent nine hours going through his email, call logs, and both his Twitter and Facebook accounts on the suspicion that he was headed into the country to look for work illegally.
“The legal principle at hand here is that a warrantless search of someone coming into the country at the border is reasonable by virtue of the fact that the United States, as a sovereign country, has the right to police and control what comes in and out of its borders,” explained Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who has spent years following the border search issue.
As a result, a warrant isn’t required in order for a CBP agent to conduct a search at the border—the Supreme Court affirmed as much in the 1997 Ramsey v. United States decision, when it ruled such searches permissible ‟pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country.”
...
Source: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/supreme-court-phone-warrant-us-border/
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that should matter to the over 90 percent of Americans who carry around cellphones. The court ruled that if a law enforcement officer wants to search your mobile device, they’re going to have to get a warrant first.
Writing for the unanimous majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued the virtually endless amount of personal information contained on the average smartphone should be granted far greater Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure than a police officer simply rifling through a suspect’s pockets to make sure they’re not hiding a gun in their jacket pocket.
“Modern cellphones are not just another technological convenience,” Roberts wrote. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
While the decision was hailed as a major milestone by electronic privacy advocates, in reality, the victory was only partial. Police officers who want to skim through someone’s text messages or browse their Tinder matches to ferret out illegal activity may have to first justify their need to do so to a judge. Border patrol agents, on the other hand, have to do no such thing.
For the millions of people, U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike, who cross into the United States each year, there are very few limitations for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when it comes to the agency’s ability to search those travelers’ electronic devices.
Based on CBP documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act-related lawsuit, between October of 2008 and June of 2010, over 6,500 people crossing a U.S. border had their electronic devices searched. Almost half were American citizens.
Anecdotally, instances of CBP agents searching the cell phones and computers of people crossing the border abound.
When On The Media producer Sarah Abdurrahman and her family were detained after coming back into the United States after a wedding in Canada, their smartphones were searched. In an interview with Forbes, Canadian actor Chad Rook recounted how customs spent nine hours going through his email, call logs, and both his Twitter and Facebook accounts on the suspicion that he was headed into the country to look for work illegally.
“The legal principle at hand here is that a warrantless search of someone coming into the country at the border is reasonable by virtue of the fact that the United States, as a sovereign country, has the right to police and control what comes in and out of its borders,” explained Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who has spent years following the border search issue.
As a result, a warrant isn’t required in order for a CBP agent to conduct a search at the border—the Supreme Court affirmed as much in the 1997 Ramsey v. United States decision, when it ruled such searches permissible ‟pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country.”
...
Source: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/supreme-court-phone-warrant-us-border/
