A Cellphone Is Not a Suitcase
The government should need a warrant to look in your phone.
An Atlanta activist named Samuel Tunick recently faced felony charges for deleting the data on his cell phone during a trip to the Dominican Republic. He provided a "duress password" to a federal agent, which deleted the phone's contents instead of allowing the agent to search it. Tunick was detained at the Atlanta airport after returning from his vacation.
His attorneys argued that the agents were interested in his phone because of his involvement with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, which protested a proposed police-training facility dubbed "Cop City." However, prosecutors have not specified a specific crime Tunick allegedly committed or provided any context for what the agents might have been searching for.
The federal agents conducting the search had no warrant, relying on a legal loophole known as the "border exception." This exception allows Customs and Border Protection agents at international ports to search luggage and cellphones without warrants, as the Fourth Amendment's protections based on "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" were not applicable to the digital realm when the Constitution was written.
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. California that police must obtain a warrant to search a cellphone. However, this ruling did not address searches at the border, leading to the ongoing practice of warrantless searches of cellphones by federal agents.
Written by urgent.news from The Atlantic's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
