“Our electronic devices carry large amounts of data that can draw a detailed map of our personal lives, including emails, texts, contact lists, photos, work documents, and medical or financial records,” told ACLU lawyer Esha Bhandari in a statement. “The Fourth Amendment claims that the government gets a permit before it can search the contents of smartphones and laptops at the border.”
A representative of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bikkannavar was arrested while returning from South America in February. While being detained at the airport, Bikkannavar was compelled to turn over the PIN code for his NASA-issued phone, a possibly severe breach of agency security. It’s still unclear whether any recorded data was jeopardized during the search.
Another plaintiff, former US Air Force director Diane Maye, encountered a similar search after returning from Europe in June. “I felt embarrassed and violated. I bothered that border officers would know my email messages and texts, and look at my photos,” she said in a report. “This was my life, and a border officer kept it in the palm of his hand.”
In May, the ACLU filed an official complaint against CBP over politically motivated perimeter searches, in reply to a similar search of US citizen Aaron Gach.
The organization may face an uphill battle in court. For years, CBP has maintained the right to search electronic devices at the border, as part of the agency’s general mandate to inspect goods entering the country. That order has traditionally been defined to include locally stored data, as unusual forms of data may constitute contraband. Because the agency’s order includes all goods entering the country, courts have not traditionally needed agents to present recorded suspicion for each search, as would be expected for domestic law enforcement.
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