United States v. Alabi

Majority - James O. Browning

No, the warrantless scanning of magnetic strips on credit and debit cards by Secret Service agents, when they already lawfully possessed the cards, did not violate the Defendants' Fourth Amendment rights. The court found that the scan was not a Fourth Amendment search under the trespass-based analysis, as established in Florida v. Jardines and United States v. Jones, because it did not involve a physical intrusion into a constitutionally protected area. The act of sliding a card through a scanner to read virtual data is not a physical penetration of space. Furthermore, credit and debit card magnetic strips are not considered "constitutionally protected areas" because they are designed for disclosure of information (the same information embossed on the card's exterior) to facilitate transactions, not for private storage. Any reencoded information would indicate unlawful activity, which society is not prepared to recognize as a legitimate privacy interest. The court analogized the scan to examining counterfeit money or a drug-sniffing dog detecting contraband, where the technique reveals only illegal activity or already known public information. Even under the Katz v. United States reasonable-expectation-of-privacy approach, the scan was not a search. While the defendants arguably had a subjective expectation of privacy (as they hadn't used the cards), society is not prepared to recognize this expectation as objectively reasonable. The purpose of magnetic strips is to disclose account information for transactions, and this information is routinely exposed to third parties. The "limited disclosure" of information (either matching the card's face or indicating contraband) does not compromise a legitimate privacy interest, similar to a canine sniff or chemical field test for drugs. The court distinguished this from general electronic storage devices (like phones or laptops) because credit cards are not primarily for private information storage; their main use is for transactional disclosure. Protecting privacy for reencoded cards would only benefit criminals. Alternatively, even if the scan was a Fourth Amendment search, it was reasonable. The "ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness," and the balance of governmental and private interests makes this standard reasonable. Given that any privacy interest in the reencoded information on magnetic strips is illegitimate (as it benefits only criminals), the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches does not apply to this specific type of scan. Finally, even if a Fourth Amendment violation occurred, the evidence from the card scans and the subsequent search warrant for electronic devices would be admissible. Under the inevitable-discovery doctrine, the evidence from the card scans would have been inevitably discovered due to the strong probable cause derived from other evidence in the car and the lack of prior legal precedent requiring a warrant for such scans. Under the independent-source doctrine, the search warrant for the laptops and phones was based on ample probable cause from other evidence (cash cards, cash, list of personal data) before the card scans were used in the warrant application, making it independent of any alleged illegality. Moreover, the officers' objectively reasonable reliance on the search warrant (even if based on tainted information) invoked the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule, as there was no clear legal guidance that such scans required a warrant.