Opinion ID: 216454
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Private Search Doctrine

Text: The district court held that the search was reasonable. Its reasoning is central to this appeal, and deserves to be set forth at length (Order at 9-10): Defendants make no argumentnor could one credibly be madethat the anonymous caller was acting as an agent of the State.... The argument rather is that the DSS administrator (Curley) who accessed the website and downloaded the images of the abuse violated defendants' Fourth Amendment rights. This argument fails for the simple reason that Curley intruded no further into defendants' zone of privacy than did the anonymous caller. Where a private party, acting on his or her own, searches a closed container, a subsequent warrantless search of the same container by government officials does not further burden the owner's already frustrated expectation of privacy. United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 117 [104 S.Ct. 1652, 80 L.Ed.2d 85] (1984).... Moreover, where an expectation of privacy in an item has been effectively destroyed by a private search, police do not violate the Fourth Amendment by examining the same item more thoroughly or with greater intensity so long as they do not `significantly expand' upon or `change the nature' of the underlying private search.... At day's end, this case falls clearly into the `assumption of the risk' exception.... `It is well-settled that when an individual reveals private information to another, he assumes the risk that his confidant will reveal that information to the authorities, and if that occurs the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit governmental use of that information.' Jacobsen, 466 U.S. at 117, 104 S.Ct. 1652.... Thus, even granting defendants a reasonable expectation of privacy in the graphic website images of Jane Doe, by sharing the website access information with the anonymous caller, defendants took the risk that their right to privacy in the website's contents could be compromised. The district court was correct in identifying Jacobsen as the key case governing this area of Fourth Amendment law, where a government search follows on the heels of a private search. In Jacobsen, FedEx employees opened an accidentally damaged package to examine its contents pursuant to a company policy regarding insurance claims. 466 U.S. at 111, 104 S.Ct. 1652. They found a suspicious white powdery substance inside, put the substance back into the container (but did not re-seal it), and summoned DEA agents. Id. DEA agents came, took the substance out of the box again, and removed a trace of it for a field test, which revealed that it was cocaine. Id. at 111-12, 104 S.Ct. 1652. One of the issues presented was whether the DEA agents' reopening of the box and removal of the substance violated the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. As in this case, in Jacobsen the initial private search did not implicate the Fourth Amendment because it was conducted by a private party. Id. at 113, 104 S.Ct. 1652. The question was whether the DEA agents' seizure of the drugs, which followed on the heels of the private search, violated the Fourth Amendment. The Court, per Justice Stevens, held that it did not. Id. at 120-21, 104 S.Ct. 1652. It ruled that the additional invasions of respondents' privacy by the Government agent must be tested by the degree to which they exceeded the scope of the private search. Id. at 115, 104 S.Ct. 1652. Because the DEA agent's seizure did not exceed the scope of the initial FedEx employees' search, held the Court, the agent's viewing of what a private party had freely made available for his inspection did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 119-20, 104 S.Ct. 1652. In applying the Jacobsen private search doctrine to this case, we must keep in mind several principles. To begin, it is clear that just because a private party violates a person's expectation of privacy does not mean that the expectation of privacy no longer exists or is not reasonable. See Walter v. United States, 447 U.S. 649, 658 n. 12, 100 S.Ct. 2395, 65 L.Ed.2d 410 (1980) (Stevens, J.) (rejecting the argument that petitioners' expectation of privacy was undone by a private search, because it is difficult to understand how petitioners' subjective expectation of privacy could have been altered in any way by subsequent events of which they were obviously unaware); see also Jacobsen, 466 U.S. at 132, 104 S.Ct. 1652 (White, J., concurring) (As Justice Stevens has previously observed, ... a person's expectation of privacy cannot be altered by subsequent events of which he was unaware. (citing Walter, 447 U.S. at 659 n. 12, 100 S.Ct. 2395)). Rather, the Court in Jacobsen was careful to point out that its private search standard follows from the analysis applicable when private parties reveal other kinds of private information to the authorities. It is well settled that when an individual reveals private information to another, he assumes the risk that his confidant will reveal that information to the authorities, and if that occurs the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit governmental use of that information. Id. at 117, 104 S.Ct. 1652. In this case, the assumption of the risk, if any, goes to how the Tipster obtained the account access information. On this score, contrary to the district court's finding, there is no evidence in the record that defendants shar[ed] the website access information with the anonymous caller. (Order at 10.) Quite the opposite, both defendants affirmed in sworn affidavits that they did not share the password with anyone. Moreover, in a February 2007 interview, the Tipster told an investigator for the Federal Public Defender Office that she pieced together the password by surreptitiously taking scraps of paper on which Jordan had jotted down various letters and numbers. Therefore, on this record, the district court's factual finding that defendants shared the password with the Tipster was clearly erroneous. It is possible that an evidentiary hearing would unearth facts to support a finding of assumption of the riskfor example, if Jordan or D'Andrea were so careless with the password that one of them assumed the risk of its disclosure. Further, it is mentioned on one of the DSS information sheets that [t]he pictures had been forwarded to the site and various responders with web-names had written to many pictures with comments of a highly sexualized nature. (D'Andrea Sealed App. 3.) This arguably implies that defendants had shared the site with others. If, however, as D'Andrea and Jordan have sworn, they never shared the password with anyone and reasonably believed no one else could get into the account, assumption of the risk would not be present. In sum, an evidentiary hearing is needed to explore whether the circumstances under which the Tipster obtained the account access information evince that defendants assumed the risk that the security of their account would be compromised. [10] Secondly, because the record does not provide meaningful details on the searches of the website by the Tipster and the DSS, we do not have enough evidence to determine whether the DSS search of the website exceeded the scope of the Tipster's search. This is important, because under Jacobsen the additional invasions of respondents' privacy by the Government agent must be tested by the degree to which they exceeded the scope of the private search. 466 U.S. at 115, 104 S.Ct. 1652. Thus, the evidentiary hearing should explore whether DSS obtained any of the pictures by exceeding the scope of the Tipster's search. To the extent it did, those pictures are not admissible under the private search doctrine. [11] Finally, the Court in Jacobsen pointed out that when the federal agent arrived to inspect the package, there was a virtual certainty that nothing else of significance [except for the white powder to which the FedEx employees had alerted him] was in the package and that a manual inspection of the tube and its contents would not tell him anything more than he already had been told. 466 U.S. at 118-19, 104 S.Ct. 1652. By requiring a virtual certainty that the government's search will reveal nothing else of significance other than the evidence to which they were tipped off by the private party, the Court was emphasizing that an antecedent private search does not amount to a free pass for the government to rummage through a person's effects. The same principle is expressed in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in the context of the plain view doctrine. See Coolidge, 403 U.S. at 466, 91 S.Ct. 2022 ([T]he `plain view' doctrine may not be used to extend a general exploratory search from one object to another until something incriminating at last emerges.); accord Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 328, 107 S.Ct. 1149, 94 L.Ed.2d 347 (1987). To comply with this limitation, the evidentiary hearing should explore whether, at the time the DSS agents accessed the website, the Tipster's information would have left a reasonable agent virtually certain that the website was used to house child pornography, and not some other significant data. [12] The district court also failed to explore an important threshold issue. Namely, even though the facts make clear that the Tipster's initial hacking into the website before she called the authorities was a private search ( see supra note 8), it is not clear whether the Tipster had to hack into the website a second time, possibly with the aid of the authorities, before she successfully directed them to the website. Specifically, some of the DSS call sheets suggest that DSS was unable to access the website after the Tipster's initial call, and possibly even after a second call. ( See D'Andrea Sealed App. 2.) This raises the possibility that the Tipster did not have the correct password when she called the authorities. [13] If that is indeed the case, the record is unclear as to whether the Tipster re-hacked the website and, if so, whether the authorities actively assisted her in this second attempt. This issue is important because a search carried out by a private party in conjunction with government efforts may no longer qualify as a private search immune from the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Momoh, 427 F.3d 137, 140-41 (1st Cir.2005) (enumerating the following factors as relevant in distinguishing private and government action for Fourth Amendment purposes: the extent of the government's role in instigating or participating in the search, its intent and the degree of control it exercises over the search and the private party, and the extent to which the private party aims primarily to help the government or to serve its own interests (quoting United States v. Pervaz, 118 F.3d 1, 6 (1st Cir.1997))); United States v. Silva, 554 F.3d 13, 18 (1st Cir.2009) (restating the aforementioned factors but noting that [w]e will not find state action simply because the government has a stake in the outcome of a search). Accordingly, on remand, the district court should explore whether the Tipster had to re-hack the website before she could give DSS the correct password; whether the DSS or other authorities were involved in the re-hacking; and whether, under the factors enunciated in Pervaz and its progeny, the re-hacking amounted to a government search and not a private search. If the district court finds that there was a second hacking and that it amounted to a government search rather than a private search, then it should inquire whether the gap in surveillance of the website restored defendants' expectation of privacy in its contents. See Illinois v. Andreas, 463 U.S. 765, 773, 103 S.Ct. 3319, 77 L.Ed.2d 1003 (1983) (holding that an expectation of privacy in the contents of a container, even if lawfully frustrated, may be regained by a gap in surveillance; provided only, however, that there is a substantial likelihood that the contents of the container have been changed during the gap in surveillance).