US v. Cardozo: Cardozo arrived at Dulles International Airport and, while going through customs, unlocked his phone at the request of customs inspectors. One of the inspectors took the phone and searched it manual for about two minutes, discovering images of child sexual abuse material. The inspectors had no particular reason to examine Cardozo’s phone. After he was charged with multiple offenses related to CSAM, Cardozo moved to suppress the images found on his phone. The district court denied the motion, Cardozo entered a conditional guilty plea, and was eventually sentenced to 18 years in prison.
On appeal, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the denial of Cardozo’s motion to suppress. The issue for the court was whether the manual search of Cardozo’s phone was “routine” and, thus, allowed at the border without any level of particularized suspicion. The court had previously held that forensic phone searches were not routine and required particularized suspicion and had blessed the manual search of a laptop at the border (albeit in a First Amendment challenge, not a Fourth Amendment one). The court found numerous reasons to distinguish the forensic search from a manual one – including the length of such a search and the kind of information that can be discovered – and concluded that it made such searches routine. As a result, inspectors did not need any reason to look at Cardozo’s phone.
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