Searching your smartphone at the border

Smartphones are so ubiquitous that we take them for granted. But their capabilities would have staggered the imaginations of people who lived just a few decades ago. The wealth of information they offer to users is matched by the immense trove of information they compile about users — where they went, whom they called or texted, what websites they perused, even how many steps they took.

The accumulation of such information presents a threat to privacy — from Facebook, Google and other companies that aggregate data, but also from the government. If law enforcement officers can examine the contents of your phone, they can peek mercilessly into every corner of your life.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Fourth Amendment forbids “unreasonable searches and seizures” by government agents. And federal courts have shown they understand that the advance of technology requires the updating of the law to shield citizens from unwarranted snooping.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court took a firm stand, ruling unanimously that police must obtain a warrant to search the phones of people they arrest. “A cellphone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house,” noted Chief Justice John Roberts. “The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

That decision protected people going about their normal business. But it didn’t affect them when crossing an international border. Customs officials have long had the power to search the persons and baggage of anyone entering or leaving the country to detect contraband such as guns or drugs. The question for the modern age is: What about cellphones and computers?

The question arose in a case involving Hamza Kolsuz, a Turkish national convicted of trying to smuggle guns out of the country. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that privacy requires limits on such searches even at border checkpoints and other ports of entry. Routine searches of pockets and suitcases, it noted, require no legal justification. But strip searches, X-rays and other invasive procedures are allowed only when agents act on the basis of “reasonable suspicion.”

Unpacking the contents of a smartphone, the court said, is anything but routine and therefore should be subject to the same restriction. The logic of the 2014 Supreme Court decision was fully applicable here, it said — noting that the government “does not seriously contest this point.”

Kolsuz was stopped on his way to board a plane for Istanbul at Washington Dulles International Airport after firearms components were found in his luggage. He had his phone taken and subjected to a thorough forensic examination that yielded an 896-page report.

His lawyers argued that the search was illegal because the government didn’t have “probable cause.” But the court said the lower standard of “reasonable suspicion” was all the agents needed to meet to examine his phone — and they had that. So his conviction stood.

Call it a happy ending — an arms trafficker goes to prison, but he also does the rest of us a favor by inducing a federal appeals court to issue a decision to keep a basic right from being fatally eroded.