That would mean that in all of the ports of entry to the United States only 82 phones per day were searched. That's absolutely ridiculous. There are approximately that many international airports. Just airports. Nevermind the enormous flow of land traffic with Canada and Mexico or all sea traffic.
CBP is claiming that they searched, on average, less than one phone per day in each airport? Give me a break.
Their claim is probably the number of times they've done some kind of deep analysis with forensic tools. Surely the number of times a border guard casually looked through emails and texts is far higher.
EDIT: I'll leave my comment below up for the record, but I'm probably wrong, and Canada above is probably right. CBP is not clear about what kind of "searches" they are counting in these stats, and they could well be only counting forensic searches, not cursory (the quick scroll through).
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That number sounds reasonable to me. CBP has no reason to hide their activities because they believe they are faithfully enforcing the law.
Electronic searches are not something agents do casually; federal agents do very few things casually on the clock. They're far too busy.
Typically it has to be either a decision in advance (targeting a specific person) or a big set of warning signals at once that create a suspicious profile.
I could be wrong about this; I don't have personal experience. But I've discussed these sorts of cases with friends who are federal agents and prosecutors.
There is something I don't understand about this whole debate: why is it considered a "search" of a phone when data is decrypted or exfiltrated?
If one "searches" a safe, and finds inside a paper with some random characters on it, the safe has been searched. The paper was there, it was discovered, the interior of the safe was viewed. The meaning of the characters may not be understood, but the safe was searched.
If one "searches" a phone, and finds inside some random pattern of bits, why is the search "not completed" until the bits are deciphered into something the agent understands?
It seems to me that the act of searching doesn't imply understanding what was found, yet for some reason all the public discourse - including legal analysis! - is predicated on the idea that "searching" a phone means deciphering its digital contents.
> CBP has no reason to hide their activities because they believe they are faithfully enforcing the law.
It is far from settled that searching the electronic records of citizens just because they're crossing a border is a faithful enforcement of the law. That's precisely what this lawsuit aims to disprove.
That being said, I agree that the number is likely accurate. CBP is not regularly searching electronic devices.
Out of the number of people who crossed, how many were flagged for additional questioning? Out of those flagged, how many were carrying a cell-phone / laptop across the border?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_airports...
CBP is claiming that they searched, on average, less than one phone per day in each airport? Give me a break.
Their claim is probably the number of times they've done some kind of deep analysis with forensic tools. Surely the number of times a border guard casually looked through emails and texts is far higher.