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Show U.S. Customs the contents of your phone…or else!

The ACLU is challenging CBP’s right to search travelers’ phones without a warrant. (Image: Customs & Border Protection)

Last spring, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security that challenged the authority of Customs and Border Protection officers to search returning travelers’ electronic devices without a warrant. Now the ACLU has taken that fight a big step further by filing a lawsuit against DHS.

“The number of electronic device searches at the border began increasing in 2016 and has grown even more under the Trump administration,” the ACLU noted. It said that CBP has conducted 15,000 electronic device searches in the first six months of fiscal 2017, compared with just 8,503 searches in the full fiscal year 2015. In 2016 there were more than 19,000 searches.

Other plaintiffs in the suit include the Electronic Frontier Foundation and 11 individuals who were subjected to warrantless phone or laptop searches when they came back into the U.S. Some of the plaintiffs had their devices confiscated by border agents and held for “weeks or months,” the ACLU said in announcing the lawsuit.

According to the ACLU, an engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California “was detained at the Houston airport on the way home from vacation in Chile. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officer demanded that he reveal the password for his phone. The officer returned the phone a half-hour later, saying that it had been searched using ‘algorithms.'”

Is there anything on your laptop you wouldn’t want the government to see? (Image: Hyatt)

The suit, called Alasaad vs. Duke, was filed in a federal court in Massachusetts. “It seeks to establish that the government must have a warrant based on probable cause to suspect a violation of immigration or customs laws before conducting such searches,” the ACLU said.

The organization noted that the individual plaintiffs come from all walks of life – a business owner, a military veteran, journalists, students, an engineer at NASA and so on.

“Several are Muslims or people of color,” ACLU noted. “All were reentering the country from business or personal travel when border officers searched their devices. They were not subsequently accused of any wrongdoing.”

ACLU said that in one case, an independent filmmaker who was returning from Canada resisted the CBP agent’s demand to turn over his phone. “Officers then physically restrained him, with one choking him and another holding his legs, and took his phone from his pocket,” the ACLU said.

The organization has set up a web page with details on each of the plaintiffs’ experiences.

Mr. and Mrs. Alasaad had their phones confiscated and held for two weeks. (Image: ACLU)

Sophia Cope, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that today’s travelers “store their whole lives, including extremely sensitive personal and business matters, on their phones, tablets, and laptops, and it’s reasonable for them to carry these with them when they travel. It’s high time that the courts require the government to stop treating the border as a place where they can end-run the Constitution,”

You can read the full ACLU legal filing here.

The ACLU has plenty of funding to support its legal action. Last January, after the Trump administration sought to ban U.S. entry to persons from several Muslim-majority countries, the organization took in $24 million in a single weekend from hundreds of thousands of donors. That was six times as much as it usually collects in a full year.

Readers: Has your device been searched by CBP? Do you think CBP officers should need reasonable cause to search it?

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Comments

  1. Sorry, I would sooner crush my cell phone under my foot than to give it to customs. About time for a new one anyway. I keep most computer data on an encrypted flash drive also.

  2. The only thing I noticed has been a massive DECREASE in Jihad in the US since Obama the jihad sympathizer left office. We should have been checking Muslims phones all along and anyone else who might commit such evil!

  3. The same thing happened to me three different times when I came back to the U.S. from Cambodia. The customs officer even admitted that they were looking for pictures of kids.

  5. It is too bad that the SCROTUS is such a dickhole, eh? Since when am I not a US citizen entering MY OWN COUNTRY!! Secure should be MY belongings from the filthy hands of Homeland (Nazi term) Security (NOT!).

  8. IMO the ever-increasing loss of privacy is a bad thing. The idea that a US citizen loses his/her rights just because he/she happens to be crossing the border is fully wrong. “Protecting the border” does not include data-scraping citizens’ computers when they go near the border.

    Sure, check all suitcases for bombs or drugs. But data-scraping computers is pure sicko Orwell.

  9. You are a fool if you sync or store any personal or private information in cloud storage. You can sync important data on your home computer for backup.

  10. The Supreme Court decided in 1976 and 2004 that people have fewer claims to their Fourth Amendment privacy rights granted by the Constitution when entering the country, because the government has to protect its borders.

  11. The problem with “Homeland Security” has always been the methods by which their agents and employees conduct their searches and ever since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, their methods have always been antithetical to the rest of the Law out there that we Americans live under.
    The notion of “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply with the Department of Homeland Security–which seems to have adopted the opposite view and until this department and its agents are brought in line with the rest of the laws we follow as Americans, we will always have this problem.

  12. I can understand your point about potential lack of clarity as to whether someone is in the US or not pre-entry, but the ACLU’s mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and
    liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution
    and laws of the United States.”

    What about that mission causes you not to be a fan of the ACLU?

  13. Yes.

    A few years back, I was returning from a vacation from Thailand. It was the very first time I had taken a laptop with me. I was first off the plane and the first in the US Customs line. The agent asked me to turn on my PC. I complied. He looked through all of my photos.

    I think they were looking for underage pornography. All they got were beaches, buddhas, and delicious Thai food.

  14. Not a lawyer so I’m definitely over my head but until you clear you are not officially back in the USA I think. While I realize this isn’t popular our constitutional rights do not extend outside of the US even to citizens in foreign countries. I don’t 100% agree with the search. I am not a fan of the ACLU but I think this needs to get through the courts and quickly. Definitely a Supreme Court item as to the establishment of an I truly back in the good ole US of A once my transport arrives or when I have proved I am a US citizen.

  15. This isn’t so simple an issue, because what is on your phone today is most likely to be a “window” into your cloud storage and other platforms. We’re actually storing less and less on the actual phone itself – but that information is in sync with a larger store of data elsewhere.

    This leads to a bunch of really hairy use cases: my phone dies on the plane ride over, and as a result – I cannot give them access even if I wanted to. Does the CBP agent ask you to access the cloud data that your phone is sync’d to? How does chain of custody work there?

    Gigantic can of worms. Congress is a fault here – they need to get with the program and define what data means in relation to privacy.

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