Computers and electronic storage media can hold massive quantities of data. At approximately 30,000 pages per gigabyte, a low-end laptop computer with a 250 gigabyte hard drive can store the equivalent of more than 7 million pages of paper. That's thousands of bankers' boxes worth, or as many pages as you'd find at a branch library with 30,000 books. When a law enforcement officer searches a computer, whether under a search warrant or a warrant exception, the officer typically searches the entire computer. At one level, this makes perfect sense, because although the officer may be looking for, say, evidence of tax evasion, the officer can't trust file names and file extensions: critical evidence of unreported income won't necessarily be saved under the name "secrettransaction.doc." It might be instead be stored under the name "cookierecipe.doc" or "familyphoto.jpg." At another level, though, this means that computer searches can be incredibly extensive, in a way that arguably runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment's particularity requirement, or at least risks rendering the Fourth Amendment impotent when it comes to protecting privacy. This is especially so because, when the officer finds child pornography on the computer -- in addition to or instead of evidence of tax evasion -- the prosecution is likely to argue that the images were in "plain view" and therefore admissible. As Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit put it recently, "[t]he pressing need of law enforcement for broad authorization to examine electronic records . . . creates a serious [...]
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