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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: 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...