Court Approves Broad Search Warrants for Facebook Data

US v. Zelaya-Veliz: Zelaya-Veliz, along with five codefendants, were involved in a conspiracy to traffic minor girls for prostitution in and around Virginia and Maryland. As part of the investigation into their operation (after one of the girls managed to escape), authorities sought a series of search warrants – four in total – for Facebook data related to Zelaya-Veliz and his codefendants, other coconspirators, and the trafficked victims. Two of the four warrants had no temporal limitation to the data that Facebook was required to disclose and all allowed authorities to search a wide swath of information, although they allowed only for a seizure of information related to specific federal crimes under investigation. Motions to suppress the information from those warrants were denied. Zelaya-Veliz and his codefendants were convicted of conspiracy and substantive sex trafficking counts at trial and sentenced to between 180 and 300 months in prison.

On appeal, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the defendants’ convictions. Their primary argument was that the district court erred by denying their motions to suppress the evidence from the Facebook warrants (which the court notes was substantial and critical to the Government’s case at trial). Initially, the court concluded that the defendants could challenge all the warrants other than the first, noting that none of their data or accounts were involved with the first warrant. In doing so, the court made clear that Facebook (or other social media) account holders have Fourth Amendment standing to challenge searches of those accounts. Turning to the merits of the defendants’ challenges, the court first held that there was sufficient probable cause for issuance of the warrants. Next, the court held that they were sufficiently limited both temporally (for two of the remaining warrants) and in terms of their scope (for all of them). As to the latter, the court held that the two-step process employe here – where investigators were allowed to search essentially all of a Facebook account but only seize that evidence related to specific federal crimes – resulted in a sufficiently particularized warrant. As to the former, for the warrant that had no temporal limitations at all, the court held that was problematic, but that ultimately the search was saved by good faith.