MetaCarta NewsMap and Bad Precedents
I was reading about a recent US federal appeals court decision, which distubed me and I stumbled across this nice implementation of the MetaCarta GeoSearch News on the Reuters site:
Now on to the disturbing precedent, from the Reuters article adjacent to the map:
A U.S. Customs inspection of a laptop computer that found child pornography does not constitute an unreasonable search and seizure, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled on Monday.
Michael Arnold argued the U.S. Constitution’s protections against searches without reasonable suspicion should have barred a 2005 search of his laptop at Los Angeles International Airport upon returning from the Philippines. He was later charged with child pornography and related crimes.
A lower court agreed with Arnold, but on Monday the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision, saying reasonable suspicion is not necessary to check laptops or other electronic devices coming over border checkpoints.
These search and seizure cases always arise in some horrendous factual situation where the person charged is guilty, but law enforcement have stepped over the line in obtaining the evidence. The public never understands these cases because the right outcome seems to have been reached — the end justifies the means.
I haven’t read the facts or the 9th Circuit opinion itself, but this seems to suggest that when crossing borders we open up the entire contents of our computers to search (a different kind of search). There would appear, in the wake of this decision, to be no privacy or prohibition whatever against a customs agent taking a computer and just spending hours looking for information of any kind to his or her heart’s content.
(Recall the Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar who was denied entry into the US after being pulled aside during a border crossing for a random check. Feldmar had written an article in a journal about LSD as a therapeutic treatment method years ago. In it he admitted drug use and was barred from the US accordingly.)
The defendant in the child porn case in question argued there should have been some reasonable suspicion triggering the search. The court disagreed and said the contents of one’s computer is just like the contents of a suitcase. That’s only true to the extent that they both “contain” things. But I would argue they’re quite distinct and the potential for abuse is great.
But this is just the latest in a long line of decisions that quietly eviscerate the Fourth Amendment.
