## Facts

- Michael Timothy Arnold returned to Los Angeles International Airport from the Philippines and was referred to secondary inspection.
- Customs officers inspected his luggage and found a laptop, an external hard drive, a memory stick, and compact discs.
- An officer asked Arnold to power on the laptop to confirm it worked; once the desktop appeared, officers opened folders and viewed images, including nude photographs.
- Officers expanded the inspection, believed they found child pornography, detained Arnold for several hours, seized the electronic devices, and then released him.
- About two weeks later, agents obtained a search warrant for further examination of the seized digital media.
- A grand jury charged Arnold with transporting child pornography, possessing child pornography, and traveling in foreign commerce and attempting to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.
- The district court suppressed the evidence, ruling that searching a computer at the border required reasonable suspicion; the government appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether the Fourth Amendment permits customs officers at the border to search the electronic contents of a traveler’s laptop and other digital storage devices without reasonable suspicion.
2. Whether the scope and privacy interests associated with digital storage require treating laptop searches as non-routine border searches.
3. Whether searching expressive materials on a laptop at the border triggers a higher standard because of the First Amendment.

## Decision

- The Ninth Circuit reversed the suppression order and remanded.
- The court held that customs officers do not need reasonable suspicion to search a laptop or other personal electronic storage devices at the border.
- The court treated the inspection as a routine, non-destructive border search, governed by the border-search exception rather than a heightened standard.
- The court rejected arguments that laptop searches should be treated like searches of a home or subjected to increased scrutiny due to expressive content.

## Legal Principles

- Routine border searches are reasonable by virtue of occurring at the border and generally require no warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion.
- Personal electronic devices brought across the border may be searched as containers for Fourth Amendment purposes; capacity to store large quantities of private information does not, by itself, create a separate constitutional category at the border.
- Heightened standards are typically reserved for border searches that are exceptionally intrusive or offensive in manner (for example, certain searches of the person), not ordinary inspection of property.
- The presence of expressive materials does not bar suspicionless border searches conducted pursuant to the border-search doctrine.

## Conclusion

The Ninth Circuit held that a suspicionless, non-destructive search of a traveler’s laptop and digital storage media at the border falls within the routine border-search exception, making the evidence admissible and requiring reversal of the district court’s suppression order.


United States v. Arnold, 523 F.3d 941 (9th Cir. 2008)