Opinion ID: 811893
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Confrontation Clause Principles

Text: The Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause confers upon the accused in all criminal prosecutions . . . the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him. United States v. Phoeun Lang, 672 F.3d 17, 21 (1st Cir. 2012) (quoting Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 131 S. Ct. 2705, 2713 (2011)) (internal quotation marks omitted). In Crawford, the Supreme Court held that the Confrontation Clause bars the admission of testimonial statements of witnesses absent from trial, unless the witness is unavailable to testify and the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross-examination. 541 U.S. at 59. Two years later, in Davis v. Washington, the Court held that Crawford's prohibition applies only to testimonial hearsay. Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813, 823-24 (2006) (emphasis added).8 Thus, the threshold question in challenge to the emails waived. See Rodríguez v. Municipality of San Juan, 659 F.3d 168, 175 (1st Cir. 2011) ([W]e consider waived arguments confusingly constructed and lacking in coherence . . . Judges are not mind-readers, so parties must spell out their issues clearly, highlighting the relevant facts and analyzing on-point authority.) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). 8 Hearsay is defined as a statement made out of court, by a person, which is offered into evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted. Fed. R. Evid. 801(c); United States v. BenítezAyala, 570 F.3d 364, 367 (2009). -30- every case is whether the challenged statement is testimonial. If it is not, the Confrontation Clause has 'no application.' Figueroa-Cartagena, 612 F.3d at 85 (quoting Whorton v. Bockting, 549 U.S. 406, 420 (2007)). The Supreme Court has yet to supply a comprehensive definition of 'testimonial.' Lang, 672 F.3d at 22 (quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 822); see also Davis, 547 U.S. at 822 (deciding narrow issues before the Court [w]ithout attempting to produce an exhaustive classification of all conceivable statements . . . as either testimonial or nontestimonial). The Court in Crawford, however, provided an illustrative list of the 'core class of testimonial statements.' Lang, 672 F.3d at 22 (quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51). This list included statements that were made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statement would be available for use at a later trial. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 52 (internal quotation marks omitted). On the other hand, the Court also indicated that certain types of statements by their nature [are] not testimonial -- for example, business records or statements in furtherance of a conspiracy, and therefore do not implicate the Confrontation Clause. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 56. Relying on Crawford, we have held in a number of cases that business records -- or their close counterpart, public records of non-law enforcement government agencies -- are admissible absent -31- confrontation. See, e.g., Lang, 672 F.3d at 22-23 (holding that an immigration document was not testimonial because an objectively reasonable person would not have understood the form to be used in prosecuting the defendant at trial); United States v. De La Cruz, 514 F.3d 121, 133 (1st Cir. 2008) (concluding that autopsy report was in the nature of a business record and thus admissible without confrontation); United States v. García, 452 F.3d 36, 41-42 (1st Cir. 2006) (affirming admission of warrant of deportation in defendant's immigration file). However, although the Supreme Court seemed to indicate in Crawford that business records are not testimonial by their nature, 541 U.S. at 56, the Court later indicated that this is not necessarily the case for all business records. In Meléndez-Díaz v. Massachusetts, the prosecutor sought to admit certificates of analysis that showed that a substance found in the defendant's possession was cocaine. 557 U.S. 305, 308 (2009). The certificates were sworn to by analysts at a state laboratory. Id. The trial court allowed the certificates, even though the forensic analysts who tested the substance did not testify. Id. at 309. The Supreme Court ruled that the admission of these certificates violated the Confrontation Clause because they fell into the 'core class of testimonial statements' identified in Crawford. Meléndez-Díaz, 557 U.S. at 310 (quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 51). The Court found that the certificates were effectively affidavits, -32- and that they had clearly been 'made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statement would be available for use at a later trial.' Id. (quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 52). In finding that the admission of the certificates violated the Confrontation Clause, the majority rejected the argument that the certificates could be admitted as business records. Although the majority found that the certificates [did] not qualify as business records, they held that even if the certificates were business records, their authors would be subject to confrontation nonetheless. Id. at 321. The majority observed that although [d]ocuments kept in the regular course of business may ordinarily be admitted at trial despite their hearsay status, this would not be so if the regularly conducted business activity is the production of evidence for use at trial. Id. at 321 (emphasis added). As the majority explained, [b]usiness and public records are generally admissible absent confrontation not because they qualify under an exception to the hearsay rules, but because -- having been created for the administration of an entity's affairs and not for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact at trial -- they are not testimonial. Id. at 324 (emphasis added). Thus, because the certificates at issue in Meléndez-Díaz had been prepared specifically for use at petitioner's trial, the court held that [w]hether or not they -33- qualif[ied] as business records, they were inadmissible unless their authors could be cross-examined. Id.; cf. Bullcoming, 131 S. Ct. at 2720 ('[D]ocuments kept in the regular course of business may ordinarily be admitted at trial despite their hearsay status,' except 'if the regularly conducted business activity is the production of evidence for use at trial.' In that circumstance, the hearsay rules bar admission of even business records.) (Sotomayor, J., concurring) (internal citation omitted) (quoting Meléndez-Díaz, 557 U.S. at 321). Returning to the facts of this case, even if the records at issue here are business records, as the government argues, we must still determine whether or not they are testimonial. See United States v. Pursley, 577 F.3d 1204, 1223 (10th Cir. 2009), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 130 S. Ct. 1098 (2010) ([E]ven if a statement qualifies for an exception to the hearsay doctrine -- based upon judicially fashioned reliability principles -- the statement's admission may violate the Sixth Amendment's mandate for 'confrontation' if it constitutes 'testimonial' hearsay. (citing Crawford, 541 U.S. at 61-62; Meléndez-Díaz, 129 S. Ct. at 2533)). To rank as 'testimonial,' a statement must have a 'primary purpose' of 'establishing or proving past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.' Bullcoming, 131 S. Ct. at 2714 n.6 (quoting Davis, 547 U.S. at 822). In identifying the primary purpose of an out-of-court statement, we -34- apply an objective test. Williams v. Illinois, 132 S. Ct. 2221, 2243 (2012) (plurality opinion). With these principles in mind, we proceed to determine whether the records Cameron challenges are testimonial in nature. 2. Yahoo! Account Management Tool, Yahoo! Login Tracker, and Google Hello Connection Logs It is clear that the admission of the Yahoo! Account Management Tool data, the Yahoo! Login Tracker data, and the Google Hello Connection Logs did not violate the Confrontation Clause. Lee, the Yahoo! witness, testified that all of the data in the Account Management Tool and the Login Tracker was data that Yahoo! collected automatically in order to further its business purposes. Bogart, the Google witness, testified in a similar fashion regarding the Google Hello Connection Logs. Although Crawford analysis generally requires a court to consider two threshold issues: (1) whether the out-of-court statement was hearsay, and (2) whether the out-of-court statement was testimonial, United States v. Earle, 488 F.3d 537, 542 (1st Cir. 2007), we dispense with the first issue because, even assuming arguendo that the documents in question contain hearsay statements, the same are in no way testimonial. As the government argues, these documents squarely conform to the requirements outlined by the Federal Rules of Evidence for business records: (1) they were made at or near the time of the event; (2) kept in the regular course of business; and (3) created in the regular course of business. See Fed. R. Evid. -35- 803(6).9 Thus, we agree with the government that the Account Management Tools and the Login tracker were business records of Yahoo!, and the Google Hello Connection Logs were business records of Google.10 9 Rule 803(6) provides that [a] record of an act, event, condition, opinion, or diagnosis is admissible despite its hearsay status if: (A) the record was made at or near the time by -- or from information transmitted by -- someone with knowledge; (B) the record was kept in the course of a regularly conducted activity of a business, organization, occupation, or calling, whether or not for profit; (C) making of the record was a regular practice of that activity; (D) all these conditions are shown by the testimony of the custodian or another qualified witness . . .; and (E) neither the source of information or the method or circumstances of preparation indicate a lack of trustworthiness. 10 Rule 803(6) also requires that the records be introduced through the testimony of a custodian or other qualified witness, and that neither the source of information nor the method or circumstances of preparation can indicate a lack of trustworthiness. Cameron protests that Lee and Bogart were not engineers, had no knowledge of the technical details of Yahoo!'s or Google's systems, respectively, and were not the ones who prepared the records. However, when dealing with computerized records under Rule 803(6), it is not required that the qualified witness be a computer programmer . . . or that she be the person who actually prepared the record. United States v. Moore, 923 F.2d 910, 915 (1st Cir. 1991) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The rule simply requires that the witness be one who can explain and be cross-examined concerning the manner in which the records are made and kept, Wallace Motor Sales v. American Motors Sales Corp., 780 F.2d 1049, 1061 (1st Cir. 1985), and Lee and Bogart satisfied this requirement. As for the trustworthiness of the records, we have held that the ordinary business circumstances described [by the qualified witness] suggest trustworthiness at least where absolutely nothing in the record in any way implies lack thereof. Moore, 923 F.2d at 915 (internal citation omitted). Such is the case here, since there is no evidence in the record that Yahoo!'s -36- Moreover, it is clear that none of these records are the type of testimonial business records that might cause Confrontation Clause concerns under Meléndez-Díaz. Lee testified that Yahoo! kept the Account Management Tool and Login Tracker data in order to serve business functions that were totally unrelated to any trial or law enforcement purpose: namely, to provide reliable data about its customer accounts. Bogart provided similar testimony regarding Google's need for the Google Hello Connection Logs. Thus, applying an objective test, Williams, 132 S. Ct. at 2243, we find that the primary purpose of collecting this data was not to establish[] or prov[e] past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution. Bullcoming, 131 S. Ct. at 2714 n.6. We therefore conclude that the district court did not err in admitting the Yahoo! Account Management Tool evidence, the Yahoo! Login Tracker evidence, or the Google Hello Connection Logs evidence. 3. Receipts of Yahoo! CP Reports We are not convinced that the same can be said for the receipts of the Yahoo! CP Reports. As Lee testified, Yahoo! created CP Reports in the ordinary course of its business. Yahoo! also kept receipts of those Reports, which were essentially copies of the Reports, in the ordinary course of its business. Thus, in analyzing whether the receipts of the CP Reports are testimonial, or Google's data recording systems were flawed in any way. -37- we consider whether the CP Reports themselves -- of which the receipts are simply computer-generated copies -- are (1) out-ofcourt hearsay statements, and (2) whether these statements are testimonial. Earle, 488 F.3d at 542. In order to constitute hearsay, the CP Reports must be: (1) statements made out of court, (2) by a person, and (3) offered into evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted. Fed. R. Evid. 801(b) and (c). As to the first prong, we have no trouble finding that the CP Reports are out-of-court statements, as they are written assertions, made outside of the courtroom, containing information on screen names that Yahoo! has associated with potential child pornography. We also find that the second prong is met as the CP Reports were made by a person, as Lee himself testified that they were made by a person with knowledge of their contents. According to Lee, someone at Yahoo!'s Legal Department reviews an archive of the images featured in the suspect's account, removes those that do not appear to contain child pornography, and includes the rest in the CP Report addressed to NCMEC. Although the receipts of the CP Reports in question do not appear to be signed by any Yahoo! employee in particular, we believe it to be evident from Lee's testimony that the CP Reports were authored by an employee in the Legal Department. Lee himself testified that part of his duties at Yahoo! included preparing these CP Reports. Therefore, the CP Reports as a whole are statements made by a -38- person, who intended those statements to be taken as true, and subsequently acted on, by NCMEC. As we will explain infra, this is the case despite the fact that some of the information contained in the CP Reports was generated automatically by Yahoo!'s different retrieval tools. Lastly, we conclude that the receipts of the CP Reports were introduced at trial to prove the truth of at least some of the matters asserted in them. The government sought to introduce this evidence to establish a link between the Suspect IP Address contained in the CP Reports and Cameron. The prosecution was seemingly operating under the impression that this IP address was the one from which the most recent image of child pornography had been uploaded, even though, as previously explained, this association is not readily apparent from the documents themselves. Consequently, we can only infer that it was the government's intent to use this evidence to link Cameron to the specific IP addresses from which child pornography images were uploaded into the Yahoo! accounts, and not just to support the proposition that said IP addresses were the ones from which Cameron registered the accounts at Yahoo!. To establish the latter, the government could have simply relied on the Yahoo! Account Management Tool, the admission of which we have just held did not implicate the Confrontation Clause. -39- The district court apparently went along with this characterization of the CP reports when it decided to admit their receipts into evidence. In doing so, the court went through a three-step logical sequence aimed at ultimately linking Cameron to the IP addresses and the Yahoo! screen names used to upload the images, just as the government had proposed. First, the district court used the receipts of the CP Reports to link the Yahoo! screen names to the IP addresses from which the suspect images were uploaded. Second, the district court used the NCMEC CyberTipline Reports to make the connection between these IP addresses and the crime of uploading child pornography images, by examining the images attached to these reports and making a preliminary finding that they portrayed child pornography as defined in federal law.11 Lastly, the court found that the incriminating IP addresses were linked to Cameron based on the evidence obtained from sources such as eBay, PayPal and the Military Watch Forum website, which evinced that Cameron had used those same IP addresses to log in to his personal accounts with those entities during the same time periods that the uploads took place. From this we can soundly conclude that the receipts of the Yahoo! CP Reports were introduced as identifying evidence, designed to unveil Cameron as the person responsible for uploading child pornography using the Yahoo! screen 11 It should be noted that the receipts of the Yahoo! CP Reports introduced into evidence did not contain any actual images of child pornography, unlike the NCMEC CyberTipline Reports, which did. -40- names featured in some of the counts of the indictment. Hence, these receipts were introduced to prove the truth of the matter asserted and as such constitute hearsay. The next step in our inquiry calls upon us to determine whether the receipts of the CP Reports are testimonial. We assume that the CP Reports, and by extension the receipts, would count as business records for the purposes of Federal Rule of Evidence 803(6). However, unlike the Yahoo! Account Management Tool, the Login Tracker data and the Google Hello Connection Logs, there is strong evidence that the CP Reports were prepared with the primary purpose of establishing or proving past events potentially relevant to a later criminal prosecution. Bullcoming, 131 S. Ct. at 2714 n.6 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). We also find that the Reports are similar in purpose to the types of out-ofcourt statements that the Supreme Court has described as testimonial in recent Confrontation Clause cases. See Davis, 547 U.S. at 828-29 (statements to law enforcement in non-emergency situation); Meléndez-Díaz, 557 U.S. at 321 (documents created in the ordinary course of business but also for litigation purpose). Thus, although the CP Reports may have been created in the ordinary course of Yahoo!'s business, they were also testimonial; the receipts of the Reports, therefore, should not have been admitted without giving Cameron the opportunity to cross-examine the Yahoo! employees who prepared the CP Reports. -41- We start by objectively viewing the evidence to determine the primary purpose of the Reports. Firstly, we note that the CP Reports refer to a Suspect Screen Name, a Suspect Email Address, and a Suspect IP Address. A suspect is one who is suspected; esp. one suspected of a crime or of being infected. Webster's Third New International Dictionary 2303 (2002). There was no testimony from Lee, nor any other evidence, that Yahoo! treated its customers as suspects in the ordinary course of its business. Indeed, the word suspect does not appear anywhere in the Account Management Tool or Login Tracker data. Further, Lee testified that in order for a CP Report to initially have been created, someone in the Legal Department had to have determined that an account contained what appeared to be child pornography images. Secondly, once Yahoo! created a CP Report, it did not merely keep it in its own files; rather, it sent the report on to NCMEC (and kept a receipt). Although NCMEC is not officially a government entity, it receives a grant from the government, and one of the uses to which NCMEC puts this grant money is to operate the CyberTipline and forward reports of child pornography to law enforcement. See 42 U.S.C. § 5773(b)(1)(P). Given that Yahoo! created CP Reports referring to Suspect[s] and sent them to an organization that is given a government grant to forward any such reports to law enforcement, it -42- is clear that under the objective test required by Williams, 132 S. Ct. at 2243, the primary purpose of the CP Reports was to establish[] or prov[e] past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution. Bullcoming, 131 S. Ct. at 2714 n.6 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The reports clearly established past events, in that each one reflected the event of child pornography being placed into a Yahoo! user account at some point in the past. These events were clearly relevant to later criminal prosecution: uploading child pornography and possessing it on the Internet are crimes, and evidence as to the IP address, and screen name of the suspect, is clearly relevant to prosecuting those crimes. We also find that the CP Reports were made under circumstances which would lead an objective witness reasonably to believe that the statement would be available for use at a later trial. Crawford, 541 U.S. at 52 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Lee testified that it was Yahoo!'s standard practice to send CP Reports to NCMEC and keep receipts of those Reports; thus, whoever generated the CP Reports in this case presumably knew that the Reports would most likely spark an investigation, and that as a result of such investigation, the government might request the CP Reports (in the form of the receipts) from Yahoo! for use as evidence. Our conclusion is bolstered by a comparison of the CP Reports at issue here with those statements the Supreme Court has -43- found to be testimonial or non-testimonial in recent Confrontation Clause cases. For example, the CP Reports here are similar in many ways to those statements that the Supreme Court found to be testimonial in Davis. Davis concerned two consolidated cases. 547 U.S. at 817. In the first case, the former girlfriend of Adrian Davis (Davis) called 911 to report that Davis was assaulting her, and narrated Davis's attack to the operator as it occurred. Id. at 817-18. At Davis's trial, the girlfriend did not testify, but the court admitted the recording of the 911 call, and Davis was convicted of violation of a domestic no-contact order. Id. at 81819. In the second case, the police responded to a domestic disturbance at the home of Hershel Hammon (Hammon). Id. at 819. The police separately questioned Hammon and his wife, the latter of whom swore out an affidavit stating that Hammon had attacked her. Id. at 820. Hammon's wife did not testify at his trial, but the court introduced her affidavit, and Hammon was found guilty. Id. at 820-21. In Davis's case, the Court found that the recording was not testimonial because the primary purpose of Davis's girlfriend's statements to the 911 operator were to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. Id. at 828; see also id. at 827 (A 911 call . . ., and at least the initial interrogation conducted in connection with a 911 call, is ordinarily not designed primarily to establish or prove some past fact, but to describe current -44- circumstances requiring police assistance.) (internal quotation marks omitted). However, in Hammon's case, the Court found that his wife's affidavit was testimonial, because [i]t [was] entirely clear from the circumstances that the interrogation was part of an investigation into possibly criminal past conduct. Id. at 829. Here, the CP Reports are more similar in purpose to Hammon's wife's affidavit than to the recording of Davis's girlfriend's 911 call. The CP Reports were clearly not intended to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency or to describe current circumstances requiring police assistance. Davis, 547 U.S. at 827-28. While possession of child pornography is a serious crime, and while discovering child pornography must certainly have troubled Yahoo! and its employees, the presence of child pornography in Cameron's accounts was certainly not an emergency comparable to what Davis's girlfriend described to the 911 operator: an ongoing physical assault. Cf. Michigan v. Bryant, 131 S. Ct. 1143, 1166-67 (2011) (holding that statements by gunshot victim to police identifying the shooter were not testimonial when police had reason to believe that the shooter might still be armed and in the area). Rather, the CP Reports were clearly intended to lead to an investigation into possibly criminal past conduct. See Davis, 547 U.S. at 829. And although the Court in Davis found it unnecessary to consider whether and when statements made to someone other than law enforcement personnel are 'testimonial,' -45- Davis, 547 U.S. at 823 n.2, we find that in the context of this case, NCMEC effectively acted as an agent of law enforcement, because it received a government grant to accept reports of child pornography and forward them along to law enforcement. Cf. id. (If 911 operators are not themselves law enforcement officers, they may at least be agents of law enforcement when they conduct interrogations of 911 callers. For the purposes of this opinion . . . we consider their acts to be that of the police.). We recognize that both cases in Davis involved interrogations, see id. at 822 n.1, and that the CP Reports here did not result from any interrogation of Yahoo!. However, as noted above, Yahoo! was obligated under federal law to report any child pornography it became aware of to NCMEC. See 42 U.S.C. § 13032(b)(1) (current version at 18 U.S.C. § 2258A(a)(1)). Moreover, the Court in Davis noted that although the decision referred to interrogations, [t]his [was] not to imply ... that statements made in the absence of any interrogation are necessarily nontestimonial. Davis, 547 U.S. at 822 n.1. The Framers, the Court noted, were no more willing to exempt from cross-examination volunteered testimony or answers to open-ended questions than they were to exempt answers to detailed interrogation. Id. (emphasis added). The CP Reports at issue here, we conclude, fall somewhere in the range between volunteered testimony and responses to an interrogation, and we are confident that the Framers would not have -46- been willing to exempt testimonial statements in this range from cross-examination. The situation here is also similar to that in Palmer v. Hoffman, 318 U.S. 109 (1943), which the Court in Meléndez-Díaz cited as an example of a case where the regularly conducted business activity [was] the production of evidence for use at trial. 557 U.S. at 321 (citing Palmer, 318 U.S. 109). Palmer involved an accident at a railroad crossing in Massachusetts. 318 U.S. at 110. The train's engineer, who died before trial, gave a statement about the accident to a railroad official and to a representative of the Massachusetts Public Utilities Commission. Id. at 111. The railroad sought to introduce the engineer's statement under the Act of June 20, 1936, 49 Stat. 1561 (current version, as amended, at 28 U.S.C. § 1732 (2012)), which allowed the admission in federal court of any memorandum or record of any act, transaction, occurrence, or event as long as such record was made in the regular course of any business. Palmer, 318 U.S. at 111, 111 n. 1. The Supreme Court held that the record was properly excluded, noting that the statement was not a record made for the systematic conduct of the business as a business, but rather was calculated for use essentially in the court, not in the business. Id. at 113, 114; see also Meléndez-Díaz, 557 U.S. at 321 (explaining the holding of Palmer). Here, the fact that the CP Reports were made pursuant to a standard Yahoo! business practice -47- does not mean they were made to advance Yahoo!'s core business purpose, which is, as Lee testified, to offer Internet-based services such as e-mail, search, and instant messaging. Just as the primary utility of the report in Palmer was in litigating, not in railroading, 318 U.S. at 114, the primary utility of the CP Reports here is in reporting crimes to law enforcement, not in providing Internet-based services to Yahoo!'s customers. Finally, we believe the CP Reports here are distinguishable from the out-of-court statements that a plurality of the Justices found to be non-testimonial in Williams, the Supreme Court's most recent Confrontation Clause case. In Williams, vaginal swabs from a sexual-assault kit were sent to Cellmark Diagnostics Laboratory (Cellmark), which produced a DNA profile from the semen found in the swabs. 132 S. Ct. at 2229 (Alito, J., plurality opinion). At Williams's trial, the prosecution called as a witness Sandra Lambatos (Lambatos), an expert in biology and DNA analysis. Id. Lambatos testified that the DNA profile produced by Cellmark matched the DNA profile of Williams, which was already in a state database as a result of a prior unrelated arrest. Id. Although the Cellmark report was not admitted into evidence at all, the Williams plurality held that [e]ven if the Cellmark report had been introduced for its truth, we would nevertheless conclude that there was no Confrontation Clause violation. Id. at 2242. -48- Based on the circumstances of the case, the plurality concluded that the primary purpose of the Cellmark report, viewed objectively, was not to accuse [Williams] or create evidence for use at trial. Id. at 2243. The plurality noted that when the state sent the kit to Cellmark, the state's primary purpose was to catch a dangerous rapist who was still at large, not to obtain evidence for use against [Williams], who was neither in custody nor under suspicion at the time. Id. The plurality also noted that no one at Cellmark could have possibly known that the profile it produced would turn out to inculpate [Williams] -- or for that matter, anyone else whose DNA profile was in a law enforcement database. Id. at 2243-44. The plurality further noted that in DNA labs, the technicians who prepare a DNA profile generally have no way of knowing whether it will turn out to be incriminating or exonerating -- or both. Id. at 2244. This last point is critical in distinguishing the Cellmark reports in Williams from the Yahoo! CP Reports here. Nobody at Yahoo! who was involved in creating the CP Reports could possibly have believed that the CP Reports could be other than incriminating. Recall that (1) Yahoo! created these Reports after its own employees had already concluded that a crime had been committed, and (2) Yahoo! then sent these Reports to an organization that forwards such reports to law enforcement. Yahoo!'s employees may not have known whom a given CP Report might -49- incriminate, but they almost certainly were aware that a Report would incriminate somebody. The government contends that we should focus not on the purpose for which the CP Reports were created, but rather on the purpose for which the records underlying the CP Reports -- such as the record of the user's IP address, and the associations between images and accounts -- were created. Because these underlying records were created for a Yahoo! core business purpose, the government contends that under the primary purpose test, the CP Reports are not testimonial. The government urges us to treat the Yahoo! CP Reports like the immigration documents we held to be nontestimonial in Lang, 672 F.3d at 22-23, or like the types of business records that other Circuits have found to be nontestimonial. See, e.g., United States v. Yeley-Davis, 632 F.3d 673, 677-81 (10th Cir. 2011) (holding that neither cell phone records nor their authenticating documents were testimonial); United States v. Ali, 616 F.3d 745, 751-52 (8th Cir. 2010) (holding that bank records regarding taxpayer refund anticipation checks were not testimonial). However, the government's argument ignores a critical point: as explained earlier, the CP Reports are themselves statements, and thus their purpose must be analyzed independently. It is not enough to analyze the purpose behind the creation of the business records on which the CP Reports rely. If -50- the CP Reports simply consisted of the raw underlying records, or perhaps underlying records arranged and formatted in a readable way for presentation purposes, the Reports might well have been admissible. See Lang, 627 F.3d at 22-23; Yeley-Davis, 632 F.3d at 677. Indeed, we have upheld the admission of the Account Management Tool and Login Tracker printouts because those exhibits simply take pre-existing records (records such as the IP addresses from which an account was created and accessed) and put them on paper in a readable format. But the CP Reports are a different animal, for they do not merely present pre-existing data; instead, they convey an analysis that was performed using pre-existing data. From our earlier discussion, recall that the CP Reports and Lee's testimony clearly indicated that, to create each Report, someone at Yahoo! analyzed Yahoo!'s data, drew conclusions from that data, and then made an entirely new statement reflecting those conclusions. Each report also refers to a Suspect who is identified by his Screen Name, Email Address, IP Address, and URL. This means that someone at Yahoo! analyzed Yahoo!'s business records and concluded that (1) a crime had likely been committed and (2) a particular user likely committed that crime.12 Thus, every Yahoo! CP Report was a new statement that conveyed an 12 We do not treat the pictures themselves as business records of Yahoo!. However, the association between a picture and an account is clearly a business record of Yahoo!; without keeping track of these associations, Yahoo! could not figure out which photos on its servers belonged to which users. -51- analysis that had not existed previously. The new statement was, in effect, someone has committed a crime, here is the evidence that a crime was committed, and here is how to identify the perpetrator. The primary purpose of this new statement was law enforcement-related, even if the primary purpose of the data used to support the statement was not. Our conclusion here is strengthened by the fact that in preparing the CP Reports, the Yahoo! employees removed the images they thought did not depict child pornography, as said images would presumably not be relevant to the prosecution of a child pornography crime. The fact that Yahoo! attached to each CP Report the records that justified its analysis -- the Account Management Tool, Login Tracker, and Image Upload Data -- does not mean that the CP Report itself was not a new statement. By creating the CP Report, the author of the report went beyond simply furnishing pre-existing records and crossed the line into testifying regarding the meaning of those records; in this circumstance, Cameron had the right to confront the author. Cf. Meléndez-Díaz, 557 U.S. at 322 (noting that traditionally, a clerk was allowed to 'certify to the correctness of an [official] record kept in his office,' but had 'no authority to furnish, as evidence for the trial of a lawsuit, his interpretation of what the record contains or shows, or to certify to its substance or effect') (quoting State v. Wilson, 75 So. 95, 97 (La. 1917)). Indeed, the distinction between business -52- records and statements about those records was recognized by the Eighth Circuit in Ali, a case on which the government relies. In Ali, the prosecution introduced exhibit 95, which consisted of two parts: (1) records from a bank, HSBC, regarding three taxpayers' refund anticipation checks; and (2) a letter from a manager at HSBC that explained the meaning of the records. 616 F.3d at 751. The HSBC manager wrote that the letter was a written statement to verify that [the three taxpayers] filed 2002 income tax returns with Cedar Tax Services and applied for Refund Anticipation Checks. Id. The Eighth Circuit held that while the bank records were nontestimonial, [t]he letter was arguably equivalent to live, in-court testimony and thus not admissible as a business record. Id. at 752.13 13 At oral argument, the government analogized Yahoo! to a bank that records statements of financial transactions. The government contended that if the bank detected suspicious activity in certain statements, and if the bank collected those statements and reported those transactions to the authorities, the bank's financial transaction statements would not become testimonial simply because the bank aggregated them in order to make its report. In support of this proposition, the Government relied on United States v. Naranjo, 634 F.3d 1198 (11th Cir. 2011). However, the government's analogy is inapplicable to the analysis of the CP Reports. The bank records in the government's example are the equivalent to the Account Management Tool, Login Tracker, or Image Upload Data in this case. These documents, like the bank records in the government's example, did not become testimonial simply because they turned out to be relevant to a prosecution. The CP Reports, however, have no equivalent in the government's example. The Reports are documents that contain analyses based on certain other records that were performed only after criminal activity was detected. -53- It may be the case that the new statement represented in each CP Report -- someone has committed a crime, here is the evidence that a crime was committed, and here is how to identify the perpetrator -- was an obvious conclusion based on the underlying data. Presumably any Yahoo! employee who saw child pornography images in a user's account would conclude that the user is at least a suspect in a child pornography crime, and that the suspect's IP address is the one associated with that account. But one small analytical step for man can sometimes be one giant leap for Confrontation Clause purposes. To hold that the CP Reports are admissible without confrontation as business records simply because they state obvious conclusions based on data in other business records would be to return to [the Supreme Court's] over-ruled decision in [Ohio v. Roberts], which held that evidence with 'particularized guarantees of trustworthiness' was admissible In addition, Naranjo is of limited relevance to this case because it is clearly distinguishable on its facts. In Naranjo, the Eleventh Circuit held that bank records and checks could be admitted into evidence as non-testimonial business records. 634 F.3d at 1213-14. However, the defendant's Confrontation Clause argument on appeal was aimed not at these records, but on summary charts based on the records that were prepared by a government agent. The Eleventh Circuit held that the charts were admissible because they simply summarized underlying data that was nontestimonial. Id. at 1213. However, the defendant was able to cross-examine the agent who prepared the summary charts, and the district court had instructed the jury to refer to the charts only as an aid . . . and not for the truth. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, Cameron had no opportunity to cross-examine the author of the CP Reports. Moreover, we deem the CP Reports to be more than a mere summary of other data; rather, they are an analysis of other data. -54- notwithstanding the Confrontation Clause. Meléndez-Díaz, 557 U.S. at 317 (quoting Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56, 66 (1980)). See also Crawford, 541 U.S. at 62 (Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty. This is not what the Sixth Amendment prescribes.). Because the CP Reports were testimonial, the receipts stored by Yahoo! were necessarily testimonial as well. Thus, they should not have been admitted without giving Cameron the opportunity to cross-examine the Yahoo! employees who prepared the CP Reports. We therefore conclude that the admission of the receipts in this case violated Cameron's rights under the Confrontation Clause. 4. CyberTipline Reports Cameron also assails the admission of the NCMEC CyberTipline Reports, arguing further violations of his rights under the Confrontation Clause. The government's response is that the CyberTipline Reports are not actually statements of NCMEC, because NCMEC merely forwards Yahoo!'s CP Reports to the appropriate law enforcement agency. We conclude, however, that this argument is unavailing, as we have already determined that the Yahoo! CP Reports from which the CyberTipline Reports are derived are testimonial. By the government's logic, NCMEC would simply be forwarding testimonial statements made by Yahoo! to law -55- enforcement. Therefore, the Confrontation Clause problems we find with the admission of CP Reports taint the admission of the CyberTipline Reports. In any event, we are not convinced that the record supports the government's contention that the CyberTipline Reports contain exactly the same information present in the Yahoo! CP Reports. In fact, we believe the record supports an opposite reading, which is that NCMEC does not always send along exactly what it receives from Yahoo! to law enforcement. Our analysis below supports the conclusion that these reports were new statements made by NCMEC and constituted testimonial hearsay statements which were admitted into evidence in violation of Cameron's Confrontation Clause rights. First, the CyberTipline Reports were introduced into evidence to prove the truth of the matters asserted in them. Our previous discussion outlining the district court's reasoning in admitting the Yahoo! CP Reports demonstrates that the CyberTipline Reports were admitted as part of a batch of evidence aimed at proving that Cameron had uploaded child pornography images onto several Yahoo! accounts. In fact, without the CyberTipline Reports the prosecution would not have been able to prove Cameron's guilt as to Counts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Eleven and Fourteen of the Indictment, which exclusively charge Cameron with uploading digital images of child pornography onto specific Yahoo! accounts -56- on specific dates. The only piece of evidence the government could have relied on to establish the specific dates on which Cameron had uploaded the offending images was the CyberTipline Reports, which reflected the date and time on which the most recent image of child pornography had been uploaded, as well as the IP address from which that upload had originated.14 The receipts of the Yahoo! CP Reports alone were not enough to sustain Cameron's convictions under the above-referenced counts because they did not contain the specific date of each upload, nor did they contain the actual images that were uploaded. As mentioned earlier, a list of the IP Addresses from which each of the images were uploaded, along with the date and time of each 14 For example, Count Eleven charged Cameron with uploading child pornography images to the lilhottee00000 account on July 26, 2007. The evidence from Time Warner and other sources showed that Cameron's residence had been assigned the IP address 76.179.26.185 on that date. To show that child pornography was uploaded to the lilhottee00000 account on that date, the government pointed to a CyberTipline Report for lilhottee00000. This Report indicated that the most recent file or image upload available in the data sent from Yahoo! was uploaded from 76.179.26.185, and further indicated that the upload date was July 26, 2007 at 9:37 AM Pacific Daylight Time. We have found no other exhibit in the record that indicates that child pornography was uploaded to the lilhottee00000 account on July 26, 2007. Nor is there any other exhibit that shows that child pornography was uploaded to this account from IP address 76.179.26.185. The CP Report that Yahoo! sent to NCMEC for lilhottee00000 does not show the times at which images were uploaded or the IP addresses from which they were uploaded (the report shows a Suspect IP Address of 76.179.26.185, which is the IP address Yahoo! associated with the account, but Lee did not explain how the address was associated). The Image Upload Data attached to the CP Report had this information, according to Lee, but the government does not appear to have introduced this data into evidence. -57- upload, was contained in the Image Upload Data that Yahoo! sent to NCMEC as part of each CP Report. However, from our review, it does not appear that this data was included with the CP Report receipts the prosecution introduced at trial, or anywhere else on the record for that matter. Therefore, the CyberTipline Reports were introduced -- and admitted -- into evidence to prove the truth of the assertions contained therein, most importantly: that child pornography images were uploaded onto a particular Yahoo! account, and that the most recent one of those images was uploaded from a specific IP Address on a specific date and time. The reasoning above defeats the government's argument that the CyberTipline Reports are not really statements of NCMEC because all they do is simply convey information sent to NCMEC by companies like Yahoo! to law enforcement. The government relies on testimony from Shehan, the NCMEC witness, to the effect that NCMEC does not add anything to the reports it receives via the CyberTipline, aside from a report ID number and an entry date for the report. However, this does not explain the fact that the CyberTipline Reports reflect the date and time of the most recent child pornography image upload, while the receipts of the Yahoo! CP Reports do not. As mentioned earlier, the only reasonable explanation we can surmise is that the NCMEC employee who created these reports analyzed the information contained in the Image Upload Data sent by Yahoo!, picked the IP Address from which the -58- most recent image was uploaded, and included this information, along with the date and time of that upload, in the CyberTipline Report. We note that the Yahoo! CP Reports did not specify whether the “Suspect IP Address” was the IP Address from which the most recent image of child pornography had been uploaded, a representation which was in fact made in the CyberTipline Reports. Therefore, in order to make this representation, the NCMEC employee who prepared the CyberTipline Reports had to have analyzed the Image Upload Data sent by Yahoo!. In doing so, the NCMEC employee undertook a similar exercise to the one performed by the Yahoo! employee who created the CP Reports; they both analyzed the underlying information in the Image Upload Data and then used that information to create a separate, independent statement. The new statement made by NCMEC can be characterized along these lines: based on the Yahoo! data, we have determined that the IP Address used by the suspect to upload the most recent image of child pornography is X, and the date and time of this upload is Y and Z. Having determined that the CyberTipline Reports were indeed new statements by NCMEC, the question now is whether they were testimonial. The answer must be yes, for it is clear that the primary purpose of a CyberTipline Report is to establish[] or prov[e] past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution. Bullcoming, 131 S. Ct. at 2714 n.6 (internal -59- quotation marks and citation omitted). Indeed, Shehan conceded as much during cross-examination: Q: Mr. Shehan, the sole purpose of the reports that are embodied by Exhibits . . . 10A through 10M [the CyberTipline Reports] is to prove facts at trial, correct? A: It's to be part of the record, yes. In addition, the primary purpose is also reflected on the face of the reports themselves, which state: Law enforcement officials please be advised: this Report is being provided solely for the purpose of a law enforcement investigation into possible criminal behavior. (emphasis on original removed). Even without the above, we would have no trouble finding that the CyberTipline Reports were testimonial. As such, they could not have been admitted without giving Cameron the opportunity to cross-examine their authors. Shehan admitted that he was not the original analyst who processed the Yahoo! CP Reports in this case. Thus, the admission of the CyberTipline Reports in these circumstances violated the Confrontation Clause.