Court: 4th Amendment Applies At Border, Password Protected Files Not Suspicious

An anonymous reader sends this Techdirt report on a welcome ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: ""Here's a surprise ruling. For many years we've written about how troubling it is that Homeland Security agents are able to search the contents of electronic devices, such as computers and phones at the border, without any reason. The 4th Amendment only allows reasonable searches, usually with a warrant. But the general argument has long been that, when you're at the border, you're not in the country and the 4th Amendment doesn't apply. This rule has been stretched at times, including the ability to take your computer and devices into the country and search it there, while still considering it a "border search," for which the lower standards apply. Just about a month ago, we noted that Homeland Security saw no reason to change this policy. Well, now they might have to. In a somewhat surprising 9th Circuit ruling (en banc, or in front of the entire set of judges), the court ruled that the 4th Amendment does apply at the border, that agents do need to recognize there's an expectation of privacy, and cannot do a search without reason. Furthermore, they noted that merely encrypting a file with a password is not enough to trigger suspicion."

Comments

Re:It's still smart to look clean...

[Dahamma]

Why bother... Just encrypt it with a random long key that you can't easily memorize and mail the key printed on a piece of paper. Then you can tell them you don't have the password even if they wanted it. I kind of doubt they are going to open up every random letter that goes through the post office.

Though it's all kind of a silly hypothetical. No one at the border wants your actual data anyway, they just want to harass you over not being given access to it.

Re:I think it's great, but...

[rujholla]

Because it is the right thing to do?