We don’t actually have laws that completely apply here, so this is essentially a test balloon / attempt to set precedent. The guy was specifically targeted by CPB due to his past protest of a thing called cop city in Atlanta, he was added to a watchlist with no notification to him, and CPB told him this was a routine secondary screening and that they wanted to search his phone for “child pornography”. Certainly would be better to have a burner or pre-wiped phone but basically I think he was caught unaware coming back from an unrelated trip.
In any case majority of Americans do not expect to have to offer up their digital systems freely outside of warrant-compulsion, which was not in play here.
That said there’s a lot of twisted loopholes they’re trying to use lately like this, so unfortunately even if it’s not the law they may be able to make it the law via this kind of precedent setting.
We don’t actually have laws that completely apply here, so this is essentially a test balloon / attempt to set precedent. The guy was specifically targeted by CPB due to his past protest of a thing called cop city in Atlanta, he was added to a watchlist with no notification to him, and CPB told him this was a routine secondary screening and that they wanted to search his phone for “child pornography”. Certainly would be better to have a burner or pre-wiped phone but basically I think he was caught unaware coming back from an unrelated trip.
In any case majority of Americans do not expect to have to offer up their digital systems freely outside of warrant-compulsion, which was not in play here.
That said there’s a lot of twisted loopholes they’re trying to use lately like this, so unfortunately even if it’s not the law they may be able to make it the law via this kind of precedent setting.