Privacy complaints mount over phone searches at U.S. border
WASHINGTON — They spoke of being humiliated and shaken. They described being “made to feel like a criminal.” And they maintained their rights had been violated.
Grievances over lost privacy run through a trove of roughly 250 complaints by people whose laptops and phones were searched without a warrant as they crossed the U.S. border. Filed with the Department of Homeland Security since 2011, mostly during the Obama administration, these stories add a personal dimension to a growing debate over rights, security and technology.
In January 2016, a Virginia woman wrote of experiencing a “blatant abuse of privacy” after she and her 19-year-old son were pulled aside for extra screening at Newark Liberty International Airport upon returning from Spain.
“They took his laptop and cellphone and proceeded to go through both after getting the passwords from him,” she wrote in her complaint, adding her phone was taken and browsed through “without my consent,” as well.
While the officers were cordial, she said, “the line between security screening and blatant search and seizure without cause or explaining is not.”
U.S. courts have long permitted government agents who protect the borders to search, without a warrant or any specific basis for suspicion, the possessions carried by people as they cross. But smartphones and other personal electronics contain vastly more private information than suitcases.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a lawsuit in Boston arguing that a warrant should be required to search such devices at the border. Last week, the Trump administration asked a judge to dismiss the case.
The lawsuit comes amid a surge in agents looking through — and sometimes copying data from — cellphones and laptops.
Midway through fiscal year 2017, Customs and Border Protection was on pace to search 30,000 travelers’ electronics — more than tripling the annual number by that agency since 2015, when it searched 8,503 people’s devices.
The complaints were submitted to the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program. In many cases, the people list a set of grievances in addition to feeling their privacy was violated, such as being detained for hours and missing connecting flights.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University obtained the filed complaints under the Freedom of Information Act and provided them to The New York Times.
A lawyer at the institute, Carrie DeCell, called the practice “digital strip-searches.”
“Border agents shouldn’t be sifting through a traveler’s text messages, emails, photographs and personal files without probable cause,” she said.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesman, citing the pending litigation, declined to comment.
But other current and former agency officials said the total number of searches remains low considering there are nearly 400 million border crossings annually.