The Fourth Circuit has ruled that border agents need no warrant, no probable cause, and not even reasonable suspicion to manually search a traveler’s cell phone, creating a two-tiered privacy standard that data-rights advocates say makes no practical sense. The July 22, 2026 EFF Deeplinks post by Sophia Cope details how the court in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo distinguished “routine” manual searches from the forensic device searches it had previously found nonroutine in Kolsuz (2018) and Aigbekaen (2019), the latter requiring a warrant for domestic investigations.
For companies and researchers who track how personal data is accessed, aggregated, or exposed at jurisdictional choke points, this ruling matters because it formalizes a loophole around device privacy based on tooling rather than data sensitivity. EFF, joined by the ACLU and NACDL as amici, argued the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply regardless of whether an officer scrolls by hand or plugs in forensic software—since both methods, as EFF notes, can expose the “sum of an individual’s private life” that the Supreme Court flagged in Riley v. California (2014).
Courts are still trying to fit smartphones into a legal framework built for suitcases, and the seams are showing.
The court’s reasoning rested on four technical distinctions—human versus machine searcher, time-limited versus comprehensive scope, accessible versus deleted/cached data, and memory versus permanent copy—but EFF argues the opinion never explains why those distinctions should lower the constitutional bar. Notably, the court leaned on the fact that the search of Belmonte Cardozo’s phone lasted only two minutes, a detail EFF calls a poor proxy for privacy harm given how modern keyword and native search tools can surface sensitive content almost instantly, without any forensic extraction at all.
There is a narrow opening left: by anchoring its holding to the two-minute duration, the court implied that longer manual searches might still trigger heightened scrutiny, though it drew no clear line. For data companies, privacy counsel, and anyone advising travelers on device hygiene at U.S. borders, the practical takeaway is immediate—within the Fourth Circuit’s Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia footprint, agents can lawfully hand-search a phone’s messages, photos, and apps with zero suspicion, so long as they skip the forensic tools. Watch for whether other circuits split from this reasoning, and whether EFF’s ongoing litigation strategy produces a case squarely testing how much time or scope converts a “routine” manual search into one requiring suspicion.
The Fourth Circuit held that, unlike forensic searches, manual searches are "routine" and thus reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant or individualized suspicion.
