DC Case Makes It Clear That Cellphones Aren't the Same as Other Possessions: AEI
A case filed last month by the Pacific Legal Foundation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia should help clarify that cellphones aren’t an “ordinary possession” when it comes to Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure, said Jim Harper, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a blog post Tuesday. “When you are carrying a cell phone around, you are carrying private and personal information comparable to what is contained in your house,” Harper wrote. “When government agents want to search a cell phone, the U.S. Supreme Court has said, ‘Get a warrant.’”
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Wilmer Chavarria, a school superintendent in Vermont and naturalized U.S. citizen, filed the suit after being subjected to a warrantless search at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport in July on his way back from a visit to Nicaragua.
The complaint said government agents told Chavarria that “he has no Fourth Amendment rights at the border,” but that isn’t true, Harper said. “There certainly isn’t language in the Fourth Amendment that allows for a border exception applicable to citizens. There is only what is reasonable, and reasonableness is required everywhere a person protected by the Constitution goes.”