The number of electronic device searches conducted by border officers surged some 500 percent in 2016, as the agency said a changing threat environment caused more people to trip their radars.
The number of searches was still small. More than 1 million people entered the U.S. per day, while Customs and Border Protection searched 65 electronic devices on the average day, a senior agency official said Friday.
Those searches included both U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents returning to their homes, as well as visitors and new immigrants arriving.
The senior official said searches netted everything from child pornography to evidence of terrorism ties — though the official couldn’t say how many of the 23,877 device searches conducted in 2016 did lead expose criminal behavior.
A year earlier, CBP reported just 4,764 device searches, or just 13 a day.
“That’s a big jump,” said Nathan Wessler, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech privacy and technology project. “They shouldn’t be able to do that on a hunch, or just because they feel like it. It should be based on actual suspicion of criminal wrongdoing based on fact.” [MORE]