W.D.La.: USPS website usage records are third-party records, and def had no REP in them

The government had digital evidence that defendant tracked a package on the USPS. His motion to suppress this third-party evidence is denied. First, anybody could track a package on the USPS website if they had the tracking number, and, second, the USPS and Comcast records of use of the website were third-party records. United States v. Felton, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 25400 (W.D. La. Feb. 16, 2019):

The government argues that even if Felton had standing to challenge the law enforcement activities regarding the searches, these activities do not constitute a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The government is correct; the IP address and tracking logs obtained from the USPS and Comcast were not owned, nor possessed by Felton. The third-party doctrine partly stems from the notion that an individual has a reduced expectation of privacy in information knowingly shared with another.

“Prior to the digital age, law enforcement might have pursued a suspect for a brief stretch, but doing so “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken. For that reason, ‘society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period of time.” However, the Court in Carpenter concluded that because the cell-phone data allowed law enforcement to track Carpenter’s every movement and to retrace his whereabouts, it invaded Carpenter’s reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical movements.

Such is not the case here. There is no doubt that the IP address and tracking logs were obtained from a third-party. By identifying Felton as the IP address owner and analyzing the data obtained from the USPS server, the government was able to determine that Felton’s IP address requested tracking information, such as the location of the packages and the delivery to their final destination.

This Court finds that first, the third-party doctrine is relevant in part because Felton’s use of the IP address is not so closely related to his “home” that the Court can say that there is a privacy interest as to his papers and personal effects. Second, the logs obtained from the USPS do not track Felton’s every movement of every day; they only identify the fact that Felton was tracking the packages. The Court further recognizes the very narrow ruling in Carpenter and finds that it does not govern this case. Thus, the Court concludes that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy as to the information provided by Comcast (Felton’s IP address) and the content of the communication between Felton’s IP address and the USPS server.