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En banc Ninth Circuit examines what limits the Fourth Amendment places on governmental searches of FedEx packages addressed for delivery outside of the United States

En banc Ninth Circuit examines what limits the Fourth Amendment places on governmental searches of FedEx packages addressed for delivery outside of the United States: You can access at this link today's ruling of an eleven-judge en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski was the lone dissenter from today's en banc ruling, which upheld the search at issue. His dissenting opinion concludes:

The previously "narrow" border search exception, United States v. Sutter, 340 F.3d 1022 (9th Cir. 2003), is now a gaping hole. Every envelope containing birthday cards or trade secrets, every e-mail, every diary, every laptop that crosses the border can be opened and its contents read by government agents, without a warrant or even founded suspicion. Worse yet, by treating these seizures as a trivial annoyance rather than a major intrusion into our freedom of thought, my colleagues open the door for police across the United States to read whatever private papers fall into their hands. This is the power the English government claimed in the Wilkes affair; the power that so outraged the colonists; the power the Fourth Amendment was built to shield us against. We sell this birthright very cheaply today.

My earlier coverage of this case appeared in this post from January 2008 after the Ninth Circuit granted rehearing en banc. The original three-judge panel's ruling can be accessed here.

Full post as published by How Appealing on October 23, 2008 (boomark / email).