Originally Posted by
polonius
Your brief quote from the article was factually erroneous. CBP argued in court that they had the necessary "reasonable suspicion" to have a look at his hard drive based on two facts: 1) that he had a folder named "Kodak Memories" on his hard drive and that 2) he was a single white male between 20-59 travelling from southeast asia. They then opened the "Kodak Memories" folder and found ADULT pornography, which they claimed in court in turn gave them the "reasonable suspicion" needed to search his entire hard drive.
The court found that (quite obviously) there is nothing a reasonable person would find suspicious about either having a folder named "Kodak Memories" or being a male between 20-59. Secondly, they found that there is nothing inherently suspicious about having adult porn either.
But they did not just open the "Kodak" folder and find child porn as the quote you posted suggests. The child porn was found after a lengthy (and illegal) search.
Yep, "fruit from the poison tree."
I'm not defending this guy's perv habits one bit, but you cannot search someone after finding that they were doing something completely legal. Adult porn (I do not like it, but I defend your right to look at it) is still legal in this country.
It's like a cop asking to search your car or your house. (If he has to ask, he does not have reasonable suspicion. Whether or not you did anything, always say no.) Saying "No" is NOT reasonable suspicion that you have done something wrong, and anything found from said search (a search performed after you said 'no') should be thrown out.
Same as not giving your ID, which is a perfectly legal thing to do in most parts of this country, is not reasonable suspicion. Yet some officers of some agencies find it totally creepy and freak out about it.