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

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."

Comments

More hoops before travelling through USA

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:More hoops before travelling through USA

[Shakrai]

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.