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Prosecutors drop case after federal judge rules laptop seized at border can't be searched

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Prosecutors have decided not to appeal a federal judge’s ruling that a warrant is needed to search a laptop seized at the border.

Rather than appeal, federal prosecutors are seeking to drop charges against South Korean businessman Jae Shik Kim, the Blog of Legal Times reports. In a May decision, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington, D.C., rejected government arguments that it had an unfettered right to search the laptop because it is a container like a purse.

The government used evidence seized from the laptop to accuse Kim of selling weapons technology to Iran, according to previous reports.

A lawyer for Kim, Jeff Ifrah, told the Blog of Legal Times the government dropped the case because it feared an appeal “could have resulted in some bad precedent about the type of searches that are going on every day at airports. I think they don’t want to be responsible for having a circuit court of appeals rule that those searches are illegal.”