US Federal Court Rules That Suspicionless Phone Searches At The Border Is Illegal

As some of you might have heard, it seems that people wanting to get a visa to the US will need to hand over social media information. In some cases, some visitors to the US have even had their phones and electronic devices searched at the border, which some believe is a violation of a person’s privacy.

The good news is that according to a federal court in Boston, they have ruled that the US government is not allowed to search a traveller’s phone or electronic devices without having a reasonable suspicion of a crime. This basically means that unless the US government has a strong reason to search your phone for evidence of a crime, they cannot just pick people at random to search their devices.

According to Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, “This is a great day for travelers who now can cross the international border without fear that the government will, in the absence of any suspicion, ransack the extraordinarily sensitive information we all carry in our electronic devices.”

While most of us probably don’t really have much to hide, it is a basic matter of privacy, where most of us would prefer if our devices that contain personal and potentially sensitive information, weren’t being searched by strangers.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones, General
Tags: Legal, Privacy