At the end of August, a federal judge in Riverside, California made a potentially landmark decision for border privacy advocates—finding that it is unconstitutional for federal agents to warrantlessly install GPS tracking devices onto a truck entering the United States from Canada.

In the grand scheme, the decision stands in the face of a controversial but standing legal idea called "the border doctrine." The doctrine's concept is that warrants are not required to conduct a search at the border in the name of national sovereignty.

And in this particular incident—a case called United States v. Slavco Ignjatov et al. that allegedly involves Starbucks cheese danishes and a trafficking organization that sounds straight out of Breaking Bad—the ruling could be a major victory for defendants as it would suppress any evidence obtained through the use of the warrantless GPS tracker.

Humans are always the weakest link

This truck-at-the-border case begins back in 2016. That's when the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI started investigating a drug-trafficking ring that sent narcotics from southern California, via Chicago, and on to Toronto.

The drug ring is allegedly headed by a man referred to in the superseding indictment as "The Boss." He appears to communicate solely through the use of modified Blackberry phones—likely from a now-shuttered company called Phantom Secure. (That company’s CEO, Vincent Ramos, was arrested in March 2018 and is currently being prosecuted in federal court in San Diego.)

According to prosecutors, by March 2017, local police had observed a man from Long Beach, California drive 10 duffle bags loaded with cocaine to meet the driver of a semi-truck. The truck had a company name (Bo-Mak Express) and a license plate from Ontario, Canada.

Police watched the Bo-Mak truck and eventually pulled it over for a purported traffic violation. After searching the truck, officers found what turned out to be 194 kilograms of cocaine. The driver, Djordje Karac, was arrested.

Karac told authorities that the boss of Bo-Mak was "Slavco"—better known as Slavco Ignjatov, the eventual lead defendant. Karac then pleaded guilty to state drug charges. (Both Karac and Ignjatov are now co-defendants in current federal case.) Ignjatov ended up coming to southern California to retrieve the truck and drove it back to Canada.

Several weeks later in May 2017, law enforcement got search warrants to go after the unnamed drivers from Long Beach. They searched his home and his stash house in an attempt to get him to turn on his co-conspirators—he did, authorities succeeded. In United States v. Slavco Ignjatov et al. documents, this man is referred to by prosecutors as "Confidential Human Source 1," or CHS1.

As FBI Special Agent Hannah Monroe wrote:

During the search of CHS1's Primary Residence, investigators found multiple encrypted devices belonging to CHS1. CHS1 provided investigators with the passwords for the devices, so the historic messages could be reviewed and photographed. A review of CHS1's encrypted Blackberry devices revealed numerous encrypted messages between CHS1 and BOSS discussing dry-run shipments as a method for testing routes after the seizure of 194 kilograms of cocaine on March 16, 2017.

At the supervision of law enforcement, CHS1 eventually urged "The Boss" to move ahead with "dry runs" as a way to test whether he could successfully ship large quantities of drugs between the US and Canada.

Unfortunately for all involved, CHS1 suddenly died of a drug overdose in June 2017. Despite this setback, the Boss's dry runs appear to have continued.