United States v. Cano
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2019
- Citation
- 934 F.3d 1002 (9th Cir. 2019)
- Standard applied
- Border-search exception — scope limited to digital contraband
What the court held
Manual cell-phone searches at the border may be conducted without reasonable suspicion, but forensic searches require it, and in this context reasonable suspicion means suspicion that the phone contains digital contraband. Any border search of a phone, manual or forensic, must be limited in scope to looking for digital contraband; a broader search for evidence of a crime is not justified by the border exception. Most of the evidence from the searches of the defendant's phone should have been suppressed.
Why
The court accepted that phone data can hold contraband — child sexual abuse material being the clear example — and tied the permissible scope of the search to that interdiction purpose. Recording phone numbers from the call log and photographing messages for later processing had no connection to verifying that the phone lacked contraband, so those actions exceeded the scope of a border search even though opening the call log to check for hidden images did not.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Cano is the most restrictive of the border-device decisions and the one most likely to matter operationally, because it constrains purpose and scope rather than only requiring suspicion. An examiner working a border referral should expect the defence to ask what the examination was looking for and whether the collection went wider than that, which makes the documented scope of the request part of the evidence. This is also where the circuits most visibly diverge, so the governing rule depends on where the phone was seized.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: border search · digital contraband · scope · suppression
Cited 45times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
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Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.