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Woman Sues US Border Agents Over Seized iPhone (bbc.com)
An American woman who had her phone seized by border agents as she returned home to the United States is suing the country's border protection agency. Bob the Super Hamste shares a report: Rejhane Lazoja was stopped at Newark airport, New Jersey, after returning from a trip to Switzerland in February. Her iPhone was seized by agents after she refused to unlock it for them. The lawsuit alleges that border agents took a copy of the data on her smartphone and failed to say whether it had been deleted. According to legal documents, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) kept the phone for more than 120 days before returning it to Ms Lazoja, who is a Muslim woman and wears a hijab. [...] "Neither was there probable cause, nor a warrant [to search the phone]. Therefore, the search and seizure of Ms Lazoja's property violated her rights under the Fourth Amendment," the filing says.
But the AC is actually not wrong. This has been going on for well over a decade, and I'm pretty certain it has been fought before in court and the court upheld it. However, I also seem to recall reading very recently that a law was either proposed or actually passed not long ago that would prevent this.
That's actually company policy where I work. When traveling to the US, we keep our normal phones at home and we get a sort of burner phone from our company to take on the trip. It's basically empty except for a few emergency phone contact numbers.
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
CBP does these seizures under the legal rationale that when you are entering the U.S., you are initially outside U.S. soil, and thus Constitutional protections do not apply. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that U.S. law does not apply outside U.S. soil (nor should you want it to - that would give the CIA free reign to enforce U.S. law in other countries). That's the whole reason Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay. Because while it's a U.S. base, it's not on U.S. soil. It's on Cuban soil. And by holding prisoners there, he hoped to deny them protections provided by the U.S. Constitution (which the Supreme Court has ruled applies even to illegal aliens if they're on U.S. soil).
Unless/until the Supreme Court rules that U.S. law applies to people at U.S. border checkpoints but have not yet been admitted to the U.S., this stuff will continue. Business travelers ferrying sensitive information in/out of the U.S. that they wish to keep out of the hands of the government typically wipe their devices clean. Then once they're out of the U.S., connect to their company's network via a VPN and restore backups of their devices. Repeat the process in reverse when entering the U.S. Connect to to their company via VPN, create a backup of their devices, then wipe their devices before going through customs. Restore from the backup once they're in the U.S. Any smart terrorist is going to use the same procedure, so I don't know what's really gained by all these searches and seizures. I guess they keep the dumb terrorists in check, but at the cost of inconveniencing hundreds of millions of travelers and leaving them feeling their privacy has been violated.
her lawyer should have told her that the border agents have that authority... as bad as it sounds... probably should wipe phone before travel as a privacy measure. delete pics and texts... probably better to use a travel phone with nothing on it. its retarded... but we live in retarded times.
Yup.... Don't bring anything in to the country if you don't want to risk it getting inspected. I'd take a burner cell anyway, something prepaid and cheap, overseas. Just forward your local calls to the burner and leave your normal phone safely at home. Same with laptops and such. Don't take them, or wipe them clean before you do.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
She's not suing CBP. That's pretty stupid since case law says she'd lose under all sorts of "protecting America" style laws.
She's filed a Rule 41(g) Motion instead, or "Motion to Return Property".
In other words, she's basically seeking to have CBP tu "return" all the data they collected from her phone - to not only destroy the images that were created, but any portions thereof, plus to have 3rd parties who many have accessed said image for any reason to again delete that data they may have collected.
Even more, she wants information on what happened to the data, including information on who it may have been provided to for what purposes and such (presumably also to verify that they too have destroyed/returned the data)/
If anything, it's probably a more unique case to go through the courts with and one where she may succeed - it wasn't necessarily wrong to collect the data, but now she's ordering its return and justification for keeping that data. And by "return", legally it means "full deletion" (remember the Waymo vs. Uber? Waymo wanted the "return" of the data which really meant the data was given back and destroyed).
More Details: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
The Supreme Court has never said that the border control can do whatever they want. The courts said that the fourth amendment still applies at the border but that what is "reasonable" for searches is necessarily expanded at the border. So yes, they can have simple searches of people without giving a reason or a warrant, however in the case of an anal search the court held that probable cause was needed based upon reasonable suspicion. As for taking a cell phone and not returning it for 120 days, I would think that this amounts to unreasonable search and seizure. Or at the very least there's certainly enough doubt that the border control can exert this much power or that the constitution has deteriorated that much that the lawsuit should be allowed to go to court. This is more than a pat-down or opening of bags. Refusing to unlock a phone does not give probable cause that a crime is being committed.