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Judge: Warrantless Airport Seizure of Laptop 'Cannot Be Justified'

Posted by Soulskill on from the digital-is-different dept.

SonicSpike writes with news of a ruling in U.S. District Court that the seizure and search of a man's laptop without a warrant while he was in an airport during an international border crossing was not justified. According to Judge Amy Jackson's ruling (PDF), the defendant was already the subject of an investigation when officials used his international flight as a pretext for rifling through his laptop. The government argued that a laptop was simply a "container," and thus subject to warrantless searches to protect the homeland. But the judge said the search "was supported by so little suspicion of ongoing or imminent criminal activity, and was so invasive of Kim's privacy and so disconnected from not only the considerations underlying the breadth of the government's authority to search at the border, but also the border itself, that it was unreasonable."

She also noted that laptop searches may require more stringent legal support, since they are capable of holding much more private information than a box or duffel bag. And while a routine search involves a quick look through a container, this search was quite different: "[T]he agents created an identical image of Kim's entire computer hard drive and gave themselves unlimited time to search the tens of thousands of documents, images, and emails it contained, using an extensive list of search terms, and with the assistance of two forensic software programs that organized, expedited, and facilitated the task."

8 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. More hoops before travelling through USA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The moral of this story is:
    1) The TSA and assorted related three letter agencies don't give a crap about due process or warrants anyways
    2) If you're travelling through the USA (into, out of, or stoppover in), either don't bring any electronics at all, or only bring freshly wiped stuff with absolutely no personal data on them. Blob up your personal files into a passworded file somewhere on the 'net that you can download when you get where you're going, and don't carry the URL for it on your person.

    1. Re:More hoops before travelling through USA by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Informative

      The moral of this story is:
      1) The TSA and assorted related three letter agencies don't give a crap about due process or warrants anyways
      2) If you're travelling through the USA (into, out of, or stoppover in), either don't bring any electronics at all, or only bring freshly wiped stuff with absolutely no personal data on them. Blob up your personal files into a passworded file somewhere on the 'net that you can download when you get where you're going, and don't carry the URL for it on your person.

      3) Encrypt your hard drive, make sure to shut down before walking through security, and remember "I do not recollect" was good enough for Reagan.

    2. Re:More hoops before travelling through USA by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Informative

      The moral of this story is: 1) The TSA and assorted related three letter agencies don't give a crap about due process or warrants anyways

      The moral of your comment is you can't be bothered to read the fucking article. TSA has nothing to do with it. It's an investigation of a foreign national suspected of violating export laws regarding aerospace hardware with defense implications (accelerometers that can be used in missile guidance systems) to China. The search was carried out by a United States Special Agent, of the DHS Security Investigations Office, not TSA.

      The ruling is actually an interesting read, the long and short of which is that the Government had tons of probable cause. The owner of the laptop had even been arrested previously and given testimony regarding his activities. This reeks of laziness on the part of the Special Agents conducting the investigation; they had more than enough to get a conventional warrant but choose instead of rely on the border search exception. Something tells me they won't be repeating that mistake in the future.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    3. Re:More hoops before travelling through USA by Shakrai · · Score: 3, Informative

      no, you miss the point. travel 'empty'. a plain fresh install with no URL history or anything on it. ie, you do a fresh build, you create a backup (that's your new image for any new travel) and you travel with a fresh install of linux (ideally not windows) and you remember, in your head, your passwords and key URLs.

      its very sad that its gotton to this. but this is probably the best way to protect yourself and arrive in one piece, unmolested.

      If you want to arrive unmolested you might try not taking part in an ongoing criminal conspiracy. Did you read the ruling or TFA? This was an ongoing investigation, where the owner of the laptop had previously been arrested; it was not a random "Let's take that dude's laptop." search. If the Special Agents involved had done their due diligence they could have easily obtained a warrant to seize the laptop rather than relying on the border search exception.

      I tend to agree with the ruling, the border search exception is flimsy cover to image someone's hard drive, but the multitude of uninformed comments here is bad even by /. standards. This was not a random search without basis or probable cause.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    4. Re:More hoops before travelling through USA by Shakrai · · Score: 4, Informative

      The lion's share of TSA employees are not "Agents." They are inaccurately labeled as "Officers" but in reality they do not possess law enforcement powers. They have no special powers (beyond that of a citizen's arrest) to arrest or detain you; that's what the uniformed law enforcement officer monitoring the checkpoint is there for.

      TSA does have a few Special Agents working for it that have such powers, as do all United States Special Agents, but they're focused on transportation security. The case being discussed here relates to export laws.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  2. Re:Violators. by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 4, Informative

    Funny how that works.

    Ironically though, this is pretty standard forensic practice. If you look at the active original, there's all kinds of possibility of tampering that could go on, even unwittingly. It's akin to trampling through a potential crime scene with no gloves, hair nets, etc, possibly while bleeding profusely over everything in sight.

    Instead, computer forensic investigators are supposed to create an image of the disk, and then they can look through that image. This is also for the defendent's protection too, since this way if the prosecution does something shady, the defense can use its own copy to point that out.

  3. Re:Violators. by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 3, Informative

    And to clarify, that doesn't mean that the seizure of the laptop or the resulting search of the hard drive was or should have been legal, just that the copying was standard forensic practice for doing so. Just because the cop wears gloves and avoids getting fingerprints on your car doesn't mean that he wasn't illegally searching it in the first place.

  4. Re:How long before Obama fires this judge? by dunkindave · · Score: 3, Informative

    First it is a she. Amy Berman Jackson was appointed as a US DIstrict Court Judge by Obama in 2011.