United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc.

In the BALCO steroid investigation, the government had probable cause as to ten named players — and executed a warrant at a drug-testing laboratory whose directory contained confidential results for hundreds of others, seizing far beyond the ten. Three district judges ordered the excess returned or suppressed. The en banc question was whether those orders stood, and what constrains the government when the practical realities of computer storage require seizing more than the warrant particularizes.

Warrants for electronic storage routinely justify over-seizure on the ground that intermingled data must be examined off-site under controlled procedures — the government itself made that case here, then disregarded the warrant's conditions, letting case agents rather than designated computer personnel review everything and treat what they saw as plain view. The en banc court held the resulting seizure unreasonable and affirmed return and suppression: the segregation process cannot be the instrument by which the government acquires what it had no probable cause to take, and greater judicial vigilance is called for as electronic seizures make the risk routine.

The warrant in question had been carefully conditioned: initial review by trained computer personnel rather than the investigating agents, on-site segregation where feasible, and procedures to keep out-of-scope data from the case team. The agents inverted each safeguard — the case agent himself reviewed the directory containing every player's results — and the government then defended the windfall as plain view. Chief Judge Kozinski's concurrence, joined by four judges, distilled the lesson into guidance for future warrants: waiver of plain-view reliance, segregation by specialists or an independent third party, disclosure of the actual risks to the issuing magistrate, and return or destruction of non-responsive data.

The suppression and return orders were affirmed (one appeal dismissed as untimely). The binding holding condemns using the mechanics of digital segregation to launder an overbroad seizure; the concurrence's protocol, while guidance rather than command, became the reference design for electronic-search warrants and taint procedures nationwide, and its logic — someone other than the interested party should separate responsive from non-responsive data — is now standard in civil forensic protocols as well.