Opinion ID: 2993622
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: whether the warrant set forth objective

Text: standards by which executing officers could differentiate items subject to seizure from those which were not; and (3) whether the government could have described the items more particularly in light of the information available . . . . United States v. Lei Shi, 525 F.3d 709, 731–32 (9th Cir. 2008). The first two factors clearly suggest that the warrant was not overbroad. The warrant allowed the government to search only the Facebook account associated with Flores’s name and email address, and authorized the government to seize only evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. § 371 (Conspiracy) and 21 U.S.C. §§ 952 and 960 (Importation of UNITED STATES V. FLORES 29 a Controlled Substance).21 The warrant also established “Procedures For Electronically Stored Information,” providing executing officers with sufficient “objective standards” for segregating responsive material from the rest of Flores’s account. See Lei Shi, 525 F.3d at 731–32. Citing United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc., 621 F.3d 1162 (9th Cir. 2010) (en banc) (per curiam) (“CDT”), Flores argues that the objective standards used here were unconstitutional. At bottom, Flores complains that the government, including the investigative team itself, was authorized to seize and search all 11,000 pages of data in Flores’s account when, as it turned out, only approximately 100 pages were truly responsive to the warrant. In United States v. Adjani, we rejected a similar argument that the government should have narrowed its search of a defendant’s e-mail account. See 452 F.3d 1140, 1149–50 (9th Cir. 2006) (“To require such a pinpointed computer search, restricting the search to an email program or to specific search terms, would likely have failed to cast a sufficiently wide net to capture the evidence sought.”). “Over-seizing” is an accepted reality in electronic searching because “[t]here is no way to be sure exactly what an electronic file contains without somehow examining its contents.” CDT, 621 F.3d at 1176, 1177. That said, we have recognized a number of significant limitations to prevent necessary “over-seizing” from turning into a general dragnet. In Adjani, we explained that warrants 21 Flores argues that the warrant authorized agents to search for and seize evidence tending to prove a conspiracy to commit any crime. She misreads the warrant, which extended only to content “tending to show narcotics trafficking.” 30 UNITED STATES V. FLORES must specify the particular crime for which evidence is sought. 452 F.3d at 1148–50. We also cautioned in CDT against retaining unresponsive data based on the “plain view” doctrine, and recognized the importance of protecting third parties’ rights. 621 F.3d at 1169–71. Consistent with this guidance, the warrant here specified a crime and a suspect, the seized data was not used for any broader investigative purposes, and Facebook, rather than government agents, segregated Flores’s account to protect third parties’ rights.22 Flores claims that the third Lei Shi factor—whether the government could have placed greater limits on the warrant’s scope in light of available information, 525 F.3d at 732—cuts in favor of finding the warrant overbroad. In particular, she notes the warrant contained no temporal limit. As it turns out, Flores’s Facebook account contained activity dating back to when she was 17 or 18 years old, and she committed the 22 We recognize that the warrant authorized retention of Flores’s full account for authentication purposes, a process we disapproved in United States v. Tamura, 694 F.2d 591, 597 (9th Cir. 1982). Tamura presented very different concerns, however, because the documents retained in that case were a company’s physical “master volumes” rather than a copy of digital data. Nevertheless, CDT reaffirmed the importance of returning (or destroying) copies of digital data. See 621 F.3d at 1170; id. at 1179 (Kozinski, C.J., concurring). But CDT allowed for retention with “specific judicial authorization,” which the warrant here included. See id. We also note that “any authorized federal agent” was allowed to search within Flores’s account for responsive data. Ideally, the government’s investigative team would not have been involved in segregating responsive data from the rest of Flores’s account. See id. at 1168, 1172 (Majority Op.). CDT did not prohibit investigative teams from participating in data segregation as a general matter, however, and instead faulted the government for misleadingly suggesting in the warrant that the team would not be involved. Id. at 1172. CDT thus serves as a reminder not to mislead magistrates or exceed the scope of a warrant, not as a blanket prohibition on data segregation by investigative teams. UNITED STATES V. FLORES 31 offense of conviction shortly after turning 23 years old.23 Seizing five or six years’ worth of data may have been excessive, though Agent Enriquez’s affidavit certainly established probable cause to search Flores’s account for some time before her arrest. Ultimately, we need not decide whether the warrant was overbroad for lack of a temporal limit because even if it was, suppression of the evidence used at trial was not required. We have “embraced the doctrine of severance, which allows us to strike from a warrant those portions that are invalid and preserve those portions that satisfy the Fourth Amendment. Only those articles seized pursuant to the invalid portions need be suppressed.” United States v. Gomez-Soto, 723 F.2d 649, 654 (9th Cir. 1984). No evidence was introduced at trial that should have been suppressed under this standard, regardless of the warrant’s potential overbreadth. Indeed, the two sets of Facebook messages introduced at trial were sent on the day of Flores’s arrest and thus fell well-within even the narrowest of temporal limits. Therefore, even though the warrant had no temporal limit, the district court did not err in denying Flores’s motion to suppress. See Gomez-Soto, 723 F.2d at 654.24 23 In her motion in limine, Flores exaggerated the scope of the problem. She claimed that the government seized data from as early as 2000. Flores testified, however, that she joined Facebook when she was 17 or 18 years old, which means that no data existed prior to 2006 or 2007, given that Flores was born in 1989. 24 Because we conclude that the evidence used at trial was seized pursuant to the valid portion of the warrant and that the motion to suppress was therefore properly denied, we need not address the government’s additional argument that the “good faith” exception to the exclusionary rule applies. 32 UNITED STATES V. FLORES