Federal court upholds border search of laptop in Texas

Computerworld - The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas has become the latest federal court to uphold the right of U.S. customs agents to conduct warrantless searches of laptop computers at U.S. borders.

In a ruling last week, the court denied a motion to suppress evidence gathered from a border search that was filed by a man who is accused of possessing, transporting and distributing child pornography.

Sandeep Verma of Sugarland, Texas, was arrested in February 2008 at a Houston airport on his return from a visit to Bogota, Colombia. The charges against him stem from evidence gathered from a search of his computer and external drives at the airport and a subsequent search of other computers and storage devices from his car, which yielded more than 100,000 illegal images.

In his motion to suppress the evidence from the border search, Verma claimed that the search of his computer and external drives at the airport violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Verma contended that the warrantless search of his computer by a cyber specialist from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit amounted to an unreasonable forensic analysis of his computer without a reason.

He argued that the "comprehensive forensic search and analysis" of his computer by a cyber specialist at the airport went well beyond a routine search of his computer. Federal agents acted "in a manner in which its intent was to circumvent the protections of the Fourth Amendment," he claimed.

The government maintained that the search stemmed from an ongoing investigation of Verma for child pornography. Well before Verma was searched at the airport, the FBI had already linked his home IP address to an Internet Relay Chat server containing images of child pornography. Prosecutors said the airport search of Verma's computers stemmed from that investigation and from the fact that he was reentering the U.S. from a country that the U.S. considers to be at "high-risk' for child pornography.

In response to Verma's motion, U.S. District Court Judge Gary Miller ruled that the searches were constitutional with or even without reasonable cause or suspicion.

Miller dismissed Verma's contention that the computer search at the airport had been non-routine or unduly intrusive.

"The court finds that reviewing the files of a computer does not rise to the level of "invasion of the privacy and dignity of the individual to make the search non-routine," he wrote in a 14-page ruling. "Even had the search of the computer been as exhaustive as Verma claims, the court is not convinced it would be considered non-routine" and needing reasonable cause or particularized suspicion for it to be conducted, he wrote.