Colorado U.S. Rep. Jared Polis has joined a bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill to protect mobile phones from national border and airport searches, his office announced Tuesday.

“The government should not have the right to access your personal electronic devices without probable cause,” he said. “Whether you are at home, walking down the street, or at the border, we must make it perfectly clear that our Fourth Amendment protections extend regardless of location.”

Polis is joining privacy champions on Capitol Hill in running the “Protecting Data at the Border Act.” The bill is sponsored in the Senate by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and Kentucky Republican Rand Paul. Polis is joined as a sponsor in the House by Texas Republican Blake Farenthold.

The Associated Press reported in February that electronic media searches shot up last year, from 5,000 to 24,000. It’s a trend privacy advocates fear has accelerated in recent months.

After President Trump in January issued the executive order banning travel to the United States from seven-majority Muslim countries, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly suggested that visitors from select Muslim countries would be required to reveal passwords to their social media accounts in order to enter the country.

Anecdotal reports of airport phone searches have mounted in the months since the Inauguration Day. Pro-privacy organizations and media outlets are publishing lists of precautions travelers to the United States should take now to protect their digital information – precautions routinely taken by visitors to nations with infamously snooping regimes, such as Russia and China.

The U.S. national borders and airport customs areas have long been a Fourth Amendment gray zone, where federal agents seize and search digital devices the same way they look through luggage. Indeed, some privacy advocates suggest the data contained in computers and phones can be scraped as long as the device is turned on as you move through airport security.

That kind of intrusion runs counter to recent law, say supporters of the bill. Polis’s office points to the 2014 Riley v. California Supreme Court ruling in which the court members unanimously found that digital devices were different than physical baggage. Chief Justice John Roberts described cell phones as “pervasive and insistent part[s] of daily life.” He said they more closely resemble body parts than they do a wallets or a handbags. A purse is only as much like a cell phone as a ride on horseback is like a flight to the moon, he argued.

The Protecting Data at the Border Act also would require agents to inform citizens of their rights before asking them to provide their devices and before revealing any online account information.

Wyden has played a key watchdog role in the Senate against national security invasions of privacy in the years since the 9/11 attacks. Former Colorado U.S. Sen. Mark Udall routinely partnered with Wyden in pushing back against Patriot Act provisions that led to sweeping collection of citizen online data.

Mother Jones reported last week that requests filed by Wyden for information about airport and border searches of digital devices had yet to be answered.

“It’s very concerning that [the Department of Homeland Security] hasn’t managed to answer my questions about the number of digital searches at the border, five weeks after I requested that basic information,” Wyden told the magazine March 28. “If [Customs and Border Patrol] were to undertake a system of indiscriminate digital searches, that would distract it from its core mission, dragging time and attention away from catching the bad guys.”

– john@coloradostatesman.com