So, in my first post about the recent Ninth Circuit opinion U.S. v. Cotterman, I introduced the opinion’s idea of a “forensic computer search” and asked some questions about what that category might include, and whether it’s a coherent bar for a heightened level of Fourth Amendment privacy protection at the United States border.
This post is more of the “what have we learned?” side of the discussion. I think that the privacy problems identified in the opinion reveal one underlying idea: