Opinion ID: 2993622
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Denial of Flores’s Motion to Suppress Facebook

Text: Evidence We review the denial of a motion to suppress de novo and the district court’s findings of fact for clear error. United States v. Camacho, 368 F.3d 1182, 1183 (9th Cir. 2004). Flores contends that the district court erred because (1) the warrant to search her Facebook account was not supported by probable cause and was stale; (2) the warrant was overbroad; and (3) the search exceeded the scope of the warrant. We reject each argument in turn.
Probable cause is established if an affidavit presents a “fair probability” that evidence of criminal activity will be found in the place to be searched. Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 238 (1983). We “give[] ‘great deference’ to an issuing judge’s finding that probable cause supports the warrant” and review for clear error. United States v. Grant, 682 F.3d 827, 832 (9th Cir. 2012). We will not find a search warrant invalid so long as the issuing judge had a substantial basis for 26 UNITED STATES V. FLORES concluding that the supporting affidavit established probable cause. United States v. Crews, 502 F.3d 1130, 1135 (9th Cir. 2007). Special Agent Enriquez’s affidavit supporting the warrant established probable cause to search Flores’s Facebook account, at least for some period of time, considering Flores called Jose Manuel from jail and asked him to purge her account. That request, along with Flores’s warning that the call was being recorded and the close proximity of the call to her arrest, supported more than a “fair probability” that agents would find evidence of drug smuggling or a smuggling conspiracy in Flores’s account. Id. Flores argues, however, that even if there was probable cause on June 21, 2012, after she called Manuel, there was no longer probable cause when the warrant issued more than three months later, on October 2, 2012. See Grant, 682 F.3d at 835 (explaining that an otherwise sufficient warrant application may become stale absent “a continuing pattern or other good reasons” suggesting that evidence remains in the location to be searched); United States v. Gann, 732 F.2d 714, 722 (9th Cir. 1984). Contrary to Flores’s argument, there are many reasons to believe that there remained a “fair probability” of finding evidence of drug smuggling in her account when the warrant issued. The mere passage “of substantial amounts of time is not controlling in a question of staleness.” United States v. Dozier, 844 F.2d 701, 707 (9th Cir. 1988). That is particularly true with electronic evidence. “Thanks to the long memory of computers, any evidence of a crime was almost certainly still on [the defendant’s] computer, even if he had tried to delete the images.” United States v. Gourde, 440 UNITED STATES V. FLORES 27 F.3d 1065, 1071 (9th Cir. 2006) (en banc) (emphasis added). Because any evidence that might have been in Flores’s account on June 21, 2012 may not have been deleted and likely could have been recovered even if it had been deleted, there remained a fair probability that Flores’s account would contain evidence of drug smuggling on October 2, 2012. Flores counters by noting that the government sought to file the warrant under seal precisely because anyone with even basic computer skills could permanently delete Facebook content. This argument disregards the fact that, on August 27, 2012, Special Agent Enriquez submitted a preservation request to Facebook for Flores’s account,19 which proved effective.20 Further, asserting that there is a genuine risk that evidence might be permanently deleted in the future, as Enriquez did in support of his request to seal the warrant, is not the same as conceding that there is no longer a fair probability that the evidence still exists (or is recoverable). See Gourde, 440 F.3d at 1065, 1071. Probable cause determinations are “commonsense, practical” questions, and a “fair probability” is less even than a preponderance of the evidence. Id. at 1069. In this day and age, even persons with minimal technological savvy are 19 Agent Enriquez did not mention the preservation request in his affidavit. He did, however, refer to “recovered data,” and he mentioned that it was “very likely . . . that evidence of the crimes under investigation exists on computers subject to the control of” Facebook. 20 In addition to the preservation request and the inherent difficulty of irretrievably deleting digital data, a Facebook security setting also ensured that the contents of Flores’s account remained accessible. Anyone logging in to Flores’s account from an unknown computer had to enter a password that was sent to Flores’s cell phone. Flores’s phone had been confiscated, so Manuel was unable to login to Flores’s account. 28 UNITED STATES V. FLORES aware that data is frequently preserved and recovered after deletion from an electronic device, particularly when a third party like Facebook is involved. See id. at 1071. Therefore, even if agents were less likely to find evidence of drug smuggling in Flores’s account in October than in June, a fair probability of finding such evidence remained when the warrant issued.
Flores next argues that the warrant was overbroad. We consider three factors in analyzing the breadth of a warrant:
items of a category described in the warrant;
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
Flores further argues that the Facebook evidence presented at trial should have been suppressed because the government exceeded its scope by seizing all 11,000 pages of data in Flores’s account. Pursuant to the terms of the warrant, however, Facebook was authorized to provide agents with a copy of the entire contents of Flores’s account. Agents then segregated 100 pages of responsive material from the entire account into a separate file within the 90-day period authorized by the warrant.25 Again pursuant to the warrant, the original copy of Flores’s account was sealed in an evidence bag and is inaccessible absent a new warrant.26 In short, the government executed the warrant exactly as it was written. We need not determine whether the 100 pages of segregated data exceeded the scope of the warrant, as Flores claims, because only two messages were admitted into evidence. In United States v. Crozier, we held that “[o]nly those items which fall outside the scope of the warrant need be suppressed.” 777 F.2d 1376, 1381 (9th Cir. 1985). Accordingly, the district court properly considered only the 25 Flores also claims that the government exceeded the scope of the warrant by refusing to enlist Facebook in this data segregation. Flores’s claim fails because the warrant explicitly authorized the government to perform this task and because the affidavit thoroughly explained why Facebook could not be assigned to find responsive materials in Flores’s account. See CDT, 621 F.3d at 1170–71; Tamura, 694 F.2d at 595. 26 In addition to the sealed copy retained for authentication purposes, the government made three working copies of Flores’s account and gave one copy to the defense, one to the prosecution, and one to the case agent. The latter two copies have been destroyed. UNITED STATES V. FLORES 33 Facebook messages the government planned to introduce at trial. Those messages were well-within the scope of the warrant. Thus, even if other evidence that was not introduced at trial might have exceeded the warrant’s scope—and there is no reason to believe that it did—the district court did not err in denying Flores’s motion to suppress.