With the number of border searches of electronic devices increasing every year, how can travelers keep their digital data safe?
Our lives are extensively documented on the phones, laptops, and other electronic devices we carry. Our devices can store an unprecedented amount of highly personal information about us, including private emails and text messages, photos and videos, web browsing history, and other data that can reveal our political and religious affiliations, medical conditions, family and romantic lives, financial status, and much more. People in many professions, such as lawyers and journalists, have a heightened need to keep their digital data confidential.
The U.S. Constitution generally places strong limits on the government’s ability to pry into our private lives. At the U.S. border, however, those limits are not as strong—a fact EFF is working to change. The “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement has traditionally permitted border agents to conduct warrantless and usually suspicionless searches on the legal assumption that travelers have negligible privacy interests in the contents of their luggage. The "border" includes ports of entry at the land borders, international airports, and seaports.
But electronic devices turn this reasoning on its head: your privacy interests in your phone, laptop, or tablet are extraordinary given the vastness of storage capacity, variety of content, and personal aspects of your life that electronic devices contain. EFF argues that a warrant based on probable cause, issued by a judge, is required for border device searches.
It’s past time for a new analysis of privacy at the border. EFF is working on many fronts to protect your digital rights when you cross the U.S. border:
Check out all of our work on border searches below, and join EFF to help support our efforts.