## Facts

- Federal investigators sought a warrant to search the first-floor residence at 3817 W. West End in Chicago in a tax-fraud investigation.
- The occupant, Jacqueline Williams, was alleged to have prepared and filed false federal income tax returns for others during 2002–2003, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7206(2).
- The warrant application requested authority to seize evidence of the alleged fraud, including computers and electronic storage media, and to conduct an off-site review of electronic contents.
- The magistrate judge issued the warrant, authorized seizure of computers and related media, and required that any search of the contents occur only after the government submitted a “search protocol” describing (1) the information sought and (2) the methods to locate it while avoiding review of unrelated data.
- After executing the warrant and seizing a computer and disks, the government requested permission to search the electronic contents without submitting the required protocol; the court declined.
- The government filed an ex parte, under-seal motion to reconsider the protocol condition, arguing that the court could not regulate the manner of execution once a valid warrant issued.

## Issues

1. Whether, consistent with the Fourth Amendment, a magistrate judge may require the government to submit a search protocol describing the scope and methods of a computer-data search before permitting examination of seized electronic contents under a valid warrant.

## Decision

- The court denied the government’s motion to reconsider.
- The court held that it could require a pre-search protocol as a condition of examining seized computer data to ensure the search remained particularized and did not become a general search.
- The court rejected the government’s analogy of a hard drive to a paper file cabinet as insufficient to address the volume and intermingling of digital information and the resulting risk of overbroad exposure to unrelated private data.

## Legal Principles

- The Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement seeks to prevent general, exploratory rummaging and is especially implicated by computer searches that can expose extensive unrelated personal information.
- A warrant-issuing judge may impose reasonable ex ante conditions on the execution of a computer search to keep the search within constitutional bounds.
- Because electronic data are commonly intermingled and searchable with targeted tools (e.g., keyword, date-range, file-type, and program-specific filtering), courts may require objective limits and methods to separate seizable from non-seizable data.
- A search protocol may be required to describe both the categories of information sought and the techniques intended to locate responsive data while minimizing review of irrelevant materials.

## Conclusion

The court ruled that, in executing a warrant involving seized computer data, it may require the government to submit and follow a search protocol that defines the information to be seized and the methods to find it, as a Fourth Amendment safeguard against overbroad, general digital searches.


In re Search of 3817 W. West End, First Floor, Chi., Ill. 60621, 321 F. Supp. 2d 953 (N.D. Ill. 2004)