Business travelers carrying laptops into the U.S. from overseas may be in for a rude experience. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers can search laptops — including opening every file on the hard drive — without any reasonable suspicion.
The decision in United States v Arnold by a three-judge panel reverses a U.S. District Court decision that said such searches require reasonable suspicion.
The case concerns Michael Arnold, who arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from the Philippines and was pulled aside by customs agents for a random laptop search. When the officers started up the computer they found two folders on the desktop labeled Kodak Pictures and Kodak Memories.
When they found photos of nude women in those folders, they spent several hours opening multiple files until they found images of child pornography. They seized the computer and two weeks later obtained a warrant. A grand jury charged Arnold with breaking federal child-pornography laws.
In its ruling, the Ninth Circuit held that international arrivals at U.S. airports are subject to the same rules as border crossings. Those rules give customs officials broad leeway to conduct searches of anything a traveler brings into the country. The international terminal of a U.S. airport is the “functional equivalent of a border,” the court said, citing the U.S. Supreme Court case of Almeida-Sanchez v. United States.
In arguments before the court, Arnold’s lawyer, Marilyn Bednarski, had a creative argument to get around the presumption that border searches are reasonable. Computers are “an extension of ourselves,” she told media outlets this week. “It really is like looking into someone’s mind, rather than looking into a box or a folder or a purse.”
In other words, Bednarski argued, laptops are actually an extension of our bodies. That argument is based…