Opinion ID: 3062159
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: All photographs of [BW].

Text: 2. All correspondence and/or documents relating to [BW]. 3. All records and information, including any diaries or calendars, showing the day-to-day activities of Rebecca Christie and/or [BW]. 4. All addresses and/or contact information of friends, families, or acquaintances who may have had regular contact with Rebecca Christie and/or [BW]. According to Ms. Christie, paragraph 3 effectively permitted law enforcement to search any and all records and information on her computer for any and all purposes. And this, she says, authorized an unprincipled and unlimited search of the sort we held invalid in Otero and Mink. The government responds that all of its search efforts, including those authorized in paragraph 3, were restricted by the warrant’s opening language. In support of its interpretation, the government points to Brooks where this court read a similar warrant as “naturally” restricting all subsequently enumerated searches to the scope set forth at the warrant’s outset. See Brooks, 427 F.3d at 1252. Advocating a parallel construction here, the government says paragraph 3 didn’t authorize it to rifle through Ms. Christie’s files looking for any sort of -13- incriminating evidence. Instead, it had to direct all of its search efforts, including those specified in paragraph 3, to information related “to the murder, neglect, and abuse” of BW. And that limiting direction, the government submits, is particularity enough under our case law. We find it hard to fault the government’s reasoning. Though the warrant before us is surely open to interpretation, Brooks did approve a similar one on the basis that its opening language limited the scope of all later enumerated searches to seeking evidence of particular federal crimes. At the very least, in light of Brooks we cannot deny that an objectively reasonable officer acting in good faith could have read the warrant before us in this same manner — as restricting the scope of any search to information “related to the murder, neglect, and abuse of” BW and thus analogous to the warrants we upheld in Brooks, Campos, and Burke. And to know just that much is to know suppression cannot follow. The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule will “not bar the use of evidence obtained by police officers acting in good faith and with reasonable reliance on a facially valid search warrant.” United States v. Tisdale, 248 F.3d 964, 972 (10th Cir. 2001) (citing United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 919-20 (1984)). In light of our past approval of a similar warrant, it seems more than a little difficult for us to say now that “a reasonably well trained officer would have known that the search” in this case “was illegal despite the magistrate’s authorization.” Id. -14- Ms. Christie rejoins that if our current case law endorses the warrant in this case then our case law needs to be reexamined. In an age where computers permit access to most every “paper and effect” a person owns, she fears that merely restricting the government to a search topic or objective does little to prevent it from examining along the way virtually every bit and byte of our lives. Risking with it the possibility the government will claim to find “in plain view” evidence of crimes totally unrelated to the reasons spurring their search in the first place. The text of the Fourth Amendment says the government must identify with particularity “the place to be searched” and requiring it to describe that place tersely as “a computer” is to allow the government to traipse willy-nilly through an entire virtual world. To prevent that, Ms. Christie suggests a warrant must go further: it must specify limitations not just what the government may search for but how the government should go about its search. In reply, the government argues that it’s often difficult to know what search protocols might be reasonably required at the time of a warrant application, before the computer has been examined. Computer files can be misnamed by accident, disguised by intention, or hidden altogether, leaving investigators at a loss to know ex ante what sort of search will prove sufficient to ferret out the evidence they legitimately seek. See Burgess, 576 F.3d at 1093; Brooks, 427 F.3d at 1252. Neither has the particularity requirement, the government points out, ever been understood to demand of a warrant “technical precision,” United States -15- v. Simpson, 152 F.3d 1241, 1248 (10th Cir. 1998), or “elaborate detail,” United States v. Triplett, 684 F.3d 500, 504 (5th Cir. 2012), but only “practical” limitations, Simpson, 152 F.3d at 1248, affording “reasonabl[e] specific[ity],” United States v. Adjani, 452 F.3d 1140, 1149 (9th Cir. 2006). Though this court’s efforts to apply the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement to computer searches are still relatively new and our existing treatment is far from comprehensive, it also seems difficult to square Ms. Christie’s demand for a how with our existing cases (Brooks, Burke, Campos, and Riccardi), all of which suggest a what may be particular enough. Indeed, we’ve gone so far as to suggest that it is “unrealistic to expect a warrant to prospectively restrict the scope of a search by directory, filename or extension or to attempt to structure search methods — that process must remain dynamic.” Burgess, 576 F.3d at 1093. This isn’t to say the Fourth Amendment has nothing to say on how a computer search should proceed. Even putting aside for the moment the question what limitations the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement should or should not impose on the government ex ante, the Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable” searches surely allows courts to assess the propriety of the government’s search methods (the how) ex post in light of the specific circumstances of each case. See, e.g., United States v. Ramirez, 523 U.S. 65, 71 (1998) (“The general touchstone of reasonableness . . . governs the method of execution of the warrant.”); United States v. Angelos, 433 F.3d 738, 746 (10th -16- Cir. 2006). So even if courts do not specify particular search protocols up front in the warrant application process, they retain the flexibility to assess the reasonableness of the search protocols the government actually employed in its search after the fact, when the case comes to court, and in light of the totality of the circumstances. Unlike an ex ante warrant application process in which the government usually appears alone before generalist judges who are not steeped in the art of computer forensics, this ex post review comes with the benefit, too, of the adversarial process where evidence and experts from both sides can be entertained and examined. See Burgess, 576 F.3d at 1094; United States v. Carey, 172 F.3d 1268, 1275-76 (10th Cir. 1999); Orin S. Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531, 574-75 (2005). Whenever courts should review search protocols and whatever the scope of our authority to do so may be, one thing is certain. To undertake any meaningful assessment of the government’s search techniques in this case (the how), we would need to understand what protocols the government used, what alternatives might have reasonably existed, and why the latter rather than the former might have been more appropriate. Unfortunately, however, that we do not have in this case. Though Ms. Christie bore the burden of proof in her suppression proceeding, she offered little evidence or argument suggesting how protocols the government followed in this case were unreasonable or insufficiently particular, especially when compared with possible alternatives. Without more help along -17- these lines, we simply cannot assess rationally her challenge to the government’s search procedures in this case and must leave the development of the law in this arena to future cases.