SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
This is a guest post by Hugh Handeyside, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project, Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and Esha Bhandari, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. It was originally posted on the ACLU Speak Freely blog.
In September 2017, we, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the federal government for its warrantless and suspicionless searches of phones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry.
The government immediately tried to dismiss our case, arguing that the First and Fourth Amendments do not protect against such searches. But the court ruled that our clients — 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident whose phones and laptops were searched while returning to the United States — could move forward with their claims.
Since then, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have had to turn over documents and evidence about why and how they conduct warrantless and suspicionless searches of electronic devices at the border. And their officials have had to sit down with us to explain — under oath — their policies and practices governing such warrantless searches.
What we learned is alarming, and we're now back in court with this new evidence asking the judge to skip trial altogether and rule for our clients.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday May 02 2019, @06:35PM (3 children)
.... That the government will make the case that the Border Search Exception [wikipedia.org] is already enshrined in precedent and that there is a compelling interest which relaxes the warrant requirements at the border and that therefore Riley v. California does not apply. And that argument will have considerable merit and differ from the prior cases where they've stood more unified (especially since the major one had to do with a car in a home driveway, which is legally considerably different from a car at the border).
Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Alito will pull to the allow-to-search side, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and probably Kagan will dissent. Roberts, Thomas, and Breyer will likely decide it and I'd bet either Roberts or Breyer will be the decider. (And I could be completely wrong about that, but I don't think I'm wrong in thinking that this case is different enough that it won't be the slam dunk the EFF/ACLU wants).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 02 2019, @07:09PM (2 children)
Unless that driveway was within 100 miles of a border: https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone [aclu.org] then there is no legal difference.
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday May 02 2019, @09:38PM (1 child)
Yet another reason to convert to metric : 100km is 40% more freedom !
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 03 2019, @05:58AM
And as part of metrification they'll add another zero to round the numbers...