A federal district court in New York has ruled that U.S. border agents must obtain a warrant before searching the electronic devices of Americans and international travelers crossing the U.S. border.
The ruling on July 24 is the latest court opinion to upend the U.S. government’s long-standing legal argument, which asserts that federal border agents should be allowed to access the devices of travelers at ports of entry, like airports, seaports and land borders, without a court-approved warrant.
“The ruling makes clear that border agents need a warrant before they can access what the Supreme Court has called ‘a window into a person’s life,’” Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, one of the groups that filed in the case, said in a press release Friday.
The district court’s ruling takes effect across the U.S. Eastern District of New York, which includes New York City-area airports like John F. Kennedy International Airport, one of the largest transportation hubs in the United States.
Critics have for years argued that these searches are unconstitutional and violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures of a person’s electronic devices.
In this court ruling, the judge relied in part on an amicus brief filed on the defendant’s behalf that argued the unwarranted border searches also violate the First Amendment on grounds of presenting an “unduly high” risk of a chilling effect on press activities and journalists crossing the border.
With several federal courts ruling on border searches in recent years, the issue of their legality is likely to end up before the Supreme Court, unless lawmakers act sooner.
And it only took 2 decades to get here…
This was such an absolute bullshit abuse of power and violation of rights. I’m also honestly surprised this wasn’t lobbied against by corporations who don’t want their corporate devices that contain proprietary information to be accessed by any Joe Dipshit working at an airport.
If it’s a concern for a corp, they can just ship the devices through the mail if there’s less scrutiny through the mail system (there usually is, they aren’t going to check the contents of every drive or try to crack the pin on every phone), or they just store their data in the cloud and pay for a new device for use at the destination so it never crosses the border.
They won’t try to crack your pin at airports either, they just force you to enter it against your will, under threat of arrest.
We’re talking about cell phones here, not hard drives and laptops. I’m not going to ship my cell phone every time I fly out of the country, if only because it has my plane tickets and travel information that I’ll need when I land. And emails and texts might be “stored” in the cloud, but old emails are also stored on the cell phone and can be read even with wifi/cell data turned off.
So how long till the Supremes rule that CBP is not only allowed to search your phone but also to perform colonoscopies at checkpoints 100 miles inland and sell the resulting videos to extremely wealthy perverts?
Depends on if Kamala and/or Congress can fix SCOTUS by next year. But I would expect this to show up on their docket in 2025, so hopefully that happens sooner than later.
Fix=CoEqual branch un-coequaling another branch…
Lol DAE hate constitutionalists and love marx? Teehee.
what do they actually “search” for on a random person’s phone anyway? one sus picture out of 1000+? or that one incriminating text out of even more texts? emails?
It isn’t random. They search phones belonging to people they suspect of crimes, but don’t have enough evidence to get a warrant for, people they think are connected to criminals even if they are not criminals themselves, and people they want to harass such as activists.
The FBI on their way to search my phone and steal all my memes
Zero Trust. Always cross international borders with burners. Always.
then you’re randomly selected once again to spend an additional 4h in a room until they check your story, because using a burner is suspicious af
Fine. My data is mine. Fuck them. But for the record it hasn’t happened to me once. It’s not like I’m walking through the line with a phone that’s just blank default. It’s just bereft of any of my private data.
in that case it makes no difference if it’s a burner or not
That’s not entirely correct. If the phone is out of my possession, other than sitting in a container passing through an X-ray machine, then the phone is considered compromised. I wont use it as my primary and it can never ever ever enter another client’s site.
Additionally I have done consulting in countries where my phone suddenly developed a case of the reboots, when none existed before.
If you plan ahead you can have a fully functioning device that brings value to your life that leaves your primary devices and accounts untouched and more importantly, locked up and away from prying eyes and government officials who are “just doing their job”.
I know I won’t prevail against an APT, but I can be successful everywhere else and a pain in the ass where I can’t.