Thread by @OrinKerr

How does the 4th Amendment apply to the "U.S. Private Vaults" case, busting the Beverly Hills store where people could anonymously store guns and drugs (and anything else)?

A thread.

latimes.com/california/sto…

First, the alleged facts. The store hosted safe deposit boxes at a strip mall. Their selling point was total privacy: You pay big $$$, and you can store anything there and no one will know. According to prosecutors, the business was trying to entice those engaged in crimes.

The store didn't want to know who its customers were. They just wanted the very large payments in exchange for privacy. I gather this is their website, and Youtube plug:

usprivatevaults.com/rental-prices

As I understand the story, the government obtained one warrant to search the entire premises, including hundreds of safety deposit boxes. Some have wondered: Can the government do that? Do they need only one warrant, based on one showing of PC, or separate warrants *per box?*

It's not clear, but there's a good arg one warrant was sufficient. When there's probable cause that a business is permeated by fraud -- when illegality is pervasive in what the company does -- courts allow one warrant to seize basically everything. scholar.google.com/scholar_case?c…

The thinking is that when illegality is core to the business model, you can't just go seize the records of illegality. You need to get everything and see the whole picture of the illegal business enterprise.

A potential difference here is that the business rents out safe deposit boxes to customers. Customers ordinarily have 4A rights in their rented places like safe deposit boxes. Does the "permeated by fraud" warrant standard for the *business* extend to individual boxes?

I'm not sure. The closest case I can think of is distinguishable on the facts. See Davis v. Gracey, 111 F. 3d 1472 (CA10 1997) (permitting seizure of entire bulletin board service, incl user e-mails, b/c business suspected of selling obscenity; but user e-mails not accessed).

There's also a possible argument that the users of U.S. Private Vaults had no REP in their boxes b/c of how sketchy the business was. Cf. the mixed cases on sending letters with bogus identities. Not sure how strong that arg is, but it's possible.

I would guess a court would ultimately conclude that the good-faith exception of Leon applies in the context of a motion to suppress. But we will see. /end