Opinion ID: 4407641
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Private Search Doctrine

Text: Before proceeding to the merits of the abandonment of privacy question presented by this case, I will assume for the moment that it would be an equitable exercise of our discretion to apply the right-for-any-reason doctrine; I do so in order to note my disagreement with the Majority’s application of the private search doctrine. [J-107-2018] [MO: Baer, J.] - 10 The seminal case regarding the private search doctrine is the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision in Jacobsen. In that case, a supervisor at an airport location of Federal Express noticed that a forklift had damaged a package. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. at 111. Together with the office manager, the supervisor opened the damaged package in order to inventory its contents pursuant to a written insurance protocol. Inside the package was a tube assembled from duct tape. The Federal Express employees cut open the tube and found baggies containing what they believed to be cocaine. Immediately, they called the DEA and returned the baggies to the tube. A DEA agent arrived, removed the baggies from the tube, and examined the substance, which tested positive for cocaine. Id. at 111-12. Other DEA agents arrived on the scene and, ultimately, obtained a search warrant based in large part upon the search performed by the first agent. Id. at 112. As the Majority recounts, the Supreme Court considered the DEA agent’s initial search as a private search because “the federal agents did not infringe any constitutionally protected privacy interest that had not already been frustrated as the result of private conduct.” Id. at 126. Because the initial invasion of privacy occurred at the hands of a private individual, and was not performed by a government agent, the subsequent search by the DEA agent was not unreasonable. This doctrine poses readily identifiable risks to an individual’s right of privacy, and entails a considerable potential for abuse. The private search doctrine essentially places the state actor behind private eyes, allowing a law enforcement officer to go wherever a private person before him has gone. To cabin the potential hazard to privacy rights, the Supreme Court limited the subsequent governmental action to the bounds of the actions of the private individual. Any additional actions “must be tested by the degree to which [J-107-2018] [MO: Baer, J.] - 11 they exceeded the scope of the private search.” Id. at 115 (citing Walter v. United States, 447 U.S. 649 (1980)). More significant to the case sub judice, and as another limitation on the private search doctrine, the Supreme Court explained that the DEA’s subsequent opening of the package did not exceed the parameters of the initial, private search because “there was a virtual certainty that nothing else of significance was in the package and that a manual inspection of the tube and its contents would not tell [the DEA agent] anything more than he already had been told.” Id. at 119. It is this statement that distinguishes the circumstances in Jacobsen from Officer Maloney’s actions in this case. In Jacobsen, the DEA agent opened a package that contained a tube. In the tube were plastic bags containing cocaine. There was nothing else to find or discover. The DEA’s re-examination of the package posed no additional threat to Jacobsen’s privacy. It was “a virtual certainty” that the second search would reveal nothing but what the Federal Express employees had found and reported. The same cannot be said for a personal computer. Regardless of the path taken by CompuGig’s Eidenmiller to locate the suspicious files as directed by Officer Maloney, there existed a very real potential for exposure of information not yet discovered by the private search. In 2019, one’s personal computer contains a wealth of information, both private and public. Even the screen saver, wallpaper, and names of files on the home screen of a computer can expose private information about the individual who owns the computer. Unlike a duct tape tube that has only one area where items can be stored, a personal computer offers virtually limitless areas for exploration. An inadvertent click on a file or tab could uncover to a state actor private information that was not part of the information collected initially by the private actor. Eidenmiller’s navigation of a personal computer at the direction of a police officer does not entail the same “virtual certainty,” or [J-107-2018] [MO: Baer, J.] - 12 near guarantee, that no other private information could fall into the hands of the law enforcement agent in the same way that the tube in Jacobsen did. The tube in Jacobsen was a limited vessel, eliminating the possibility that the DEA agent would be able to exceed the bounds of the private search. Indeed, if the tube could be said to have an opposite, that opposite would be a personal computer. Because nothing in the record as established in this case convincingly demonstrates a “virtual certainty” that Officer Maloney’s second, warrantless search would not exceed the scope of the initial private search and would not reveal information other than what Eidenmiller already had discovered, I would find the private search doctrine to be inapplicable in this case in the event that the doctrine was properly before us. That does not mean that I would reverse the lower courts. For the reasons that follow, I would hold that Shaffer ultimately, though not initially, abandoned his expectation of privacy in the computer. III. Shaffer’s Expectation of Privacy in the Personal Computer We granted allocatur in this case to consider whether the owner of a personal computer abandons his or her expectation of privacy in closed files on that computer the moment he or she drops it off with a computer repair service. This question necessarily implicates the third-party doctrine. When we accepted this appeal, we provided ourselves with an opportunity to reconsider that doctrine in the context of our modern high-tech world, a world in which the interaction between technology and one’s personal information has changed significantly from the past. In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the United States Supreme Court stated for the first time that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution “protects people, not places.” Id. at 351. Katz expanded the protections of the Fourth [J-107-2018] [MO: Baer, J.] - 13 Amendment to include those places where one enjoys a reasonable expectation of privacy. This landmark decision marked the beginning of our current understanding that a person, place, area, or thing is protected by the Fourth Amendment if the person asserting the protection seeks to preserve the area or place infringed upon as private, and if the expectation of privacy is one that society would deem reasonable. See Commonwealth v. Shabezz, 166 A.3d 278, 288 (Pa. 2017). The third-party doctrine addresses the question of whether a person’s expectation of privacy applies when the object as to which the expectation is asserted is placed in the hands of a third person. Had this case been brought even a decade ago, its resolution as a matter of federal constitutional law would have been relatively straightforward. In United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), and Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), the Supreme Court of the United States firmly established the third-party doctrine, effectively holding that a person retained no expectation of privacy in materials given over to the possession of a third party. In Miller, the Court held that Miller’s bank records actually were business records of the bank in which Miller could “assert neither ownership nor possession.” Miller, 425 U.S. at 440. Further, the records, in possession of a third party, could not be deemed exclusively private to Miller as they were “exposed to [bank] employees in the ordinary course of business.” Id. at 442. Miller had “take[n] the risk, in revealing his affairs to another, that the information [would] be conveyed by that person to the [g]overnment.” Id. at 443. In Smith, the Supreme Court addressed Smith’s claim that he held a reasonable expectation of privacy in a pen register that recorded the outgoing numbers dialed from his landline telephone. The Court rejected Smith’s claim, opining that it “doubt[ed] that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.” Smith, 442 U.S. at 742. The Court noted that, at the time, telephone companies used [J-107-2018] [MO: Baer, J.] - 14 dialed numbers for a variety of legitimate business purposes. When a person makes a call, the Smith Court reasoned, he or she voluntarily conveyed the dialed number to the phone company, which received the information in the regular course of business. Thus, as in Miller, Smith had assumed the risk that, by dialing a number, he subjected himself to the possibility that the telephone company would turn his dialing information over to the government. The Court explained that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Id. at 743-44. Under a reading of only Miller and Smith, it would appear that Shaffer could claim no legitimate expectation of privacy in his computer once he turned it over to CompuGig. By doing so, he would be deemed by those precedents voluntarily to have exposed the computer’s contents to CompuGig’s employees, who received the information in the regular course of their business. The argument would follow that Shaffer assumed the risk that a person working at CompuGig could turn any information found on the computer over to the police. However, the jurisprudential landscape has evolved since the 1970’s. A fair review of the United States Supreme Court’s recent cases, beginning with United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), reveals that the Miller/Smith view of the third-party doctrine now is somewhat antiquated, inasmuch as modern technology has caused the High Court to think differently about third-party interactions. In 2012, the Court in Jones confronted the question of whether affixing a GPS device to a person’s vehicle and tracking his or her movements—without a search warrant—constitutes a search or seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 402. In deciding that doing so was indeed a search, the Court (in an opinion authored by Justice Scalia) emphasized the intrusiveness that the government’s actions entailed: “The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.” Id. at 404. The Court had “no doubt” that this was [J-107-2018] [MO: Baer, J.] - 15 a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Id. The installation of the GPS device effectively was a trespass that, for twenty-eight days, permitted the government to know and evaluate all of Jones’ vehicular movements.