At the onset of the New Year, the Criminal Part of New York Supreme Court issued a ruling which called upon prosecutors and judges to diligently scrutinize search warrants seeking to access information stored on a defendant's electronic devices before signing off on them. The court’s ruling in People v. Covlin provides the law an opportunity to catch up with rapid changes in technology and society which have been diminishing the Fourth Amendment rights of individuals.
People v. Covlin represents the latest precedent to address the problem of non-particularized warrants for digital data. According to the Court, the language of the warrants issued in this case failed to meet the “sufficiently particularized” standard required by the Fourth Amendment. Specifically, the warrants authorized a search for any possible kind of record or electronic media, or anything on the defendant’s cell phone.
A warrant is supposed to limit the parameters of searches by law enforcement agents. Failure to limit the scope to which an officer may search and seize the subject’s property would effectively render the Fourth Amendment irrelevant.
The law has been slow to catch up to significant changes in technology and society. The growing popularity of digital technologies in modern culture has increasingly caused digital searches to replace traditional physical searches of homes, apartments, offices, or vehicles.
In United States v. Galpin, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit addressed the increasing problem pertaining to these digital searches in stating:
Once the government has obtained authorization to search the hard drive, the government may claim that the contents of every file it chose to open were in plain view and, therefore, admissible even if they implicate the defendant in a crime not contemplated by the warrant. There is, thus, a serious risk that every warrant for electronic information will become, in effect, a general warrant, rendering the Fourth Amendment irrelevant. This threat demands a heightened sensitivity to the particularity requirement in the context of digital searches.
More often than not, an initial search of a defendant’s digital files results in the production of thousands of documents and metadata, making it difficult to locate relevant information in a sea of irrelevant documents. Often requiring months of reviewing highly personal documents, which are irrelevant to the crime charged. The process is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. In order to do so, the entire haystack must be meticulously examined. Thus, the New York Supreme Court’s argument is not that the prosecution should not be able to search the defendant’s digital files in an initial search for information pertaining to the crime charged, but rather, the search warrant must state with particularity the materials that may ultimately be lawfully seized.
The central message of Covlin is that until the law can catch up to rapid technological innovations in society, search warrants seeking to access a defendant's digital data must be scrutinized with the utmost diligence in order to effectively preserve one’s Constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.