A judge has ruled that laptops are more than just crates and cargo that can be willy-nilly seized and searched — without a warrant — in the border zone or at international airports. Rather, based on SCOTUS precedent, they can be presumed to hold so much private information that a warrant must be obtained to take them.
That's a good thing. The feds have long used seizure and inspection precedents at border crossings to take phones, drives, and computers for further extensive searches, particularly in cases where they did not have enough probable cause to get a warrant if the device were not crossing a border. That specfic legalistic trickery has been, for the moment, quashed.
Warrantless airport seizure of laptop “cannot be justified,” judge rules | Ars Technica
Feds said a laptop is simply a “container” that can be searched without warrant.
