The court ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2231481/the-fourth-circuit-says-border-agents-can-search-your-phone-by-hand-no-suspicion-requir

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post.The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the…

  • Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish
    81·
    20 days ago

    Border agents (otherwise known as ICE) have been dispersed across the country to terrorize protestors and voting booths. They harass anyone left of far right, and especially minorities. They have already moved hundreds of people to concentration camps, and there are murders in the double digits so far.

    I appreciate the thought, however it is more likely I’d have to interact with one of these people than you think.

    • zikzak025@lemmy.world
      21·
      20 days ago

      ICE acts outside of the law anyways, so whatever the law says or doesn’t say seems to have no real impact on how they behave. The article itself mentions only searches at the border when entering the US, so this legal precedent (in theory) shouldn’t enable them to perform a warrantless search if you’re already in the US.

      If you have more legal context than the author and want to read further into the precedent than that, I’m not here to say anyone is wrong, just that the scenario you mention doesn’t seem to apply to what the article is describing.

      The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports

      • DillDough@lemmy.zip
        2·
        20 days ago

        Practically the entire country is the border in US law and as you pointed out, law is dead here… obviously they aren’t going to state “we have the right to manually search every single person’s phone” because that would piss off everybody, we’ve been through shit this before and have definined borders to literally be like 95% of the country.