FBI Knocks Out Hotel-Casino Internet, Agents ‘Fix’ It Without Warrant

Have you
ever worried that when your Internet goes it, it just might be a
federal agent cutting the wires? And that when the cable guy shows
up to fix it, he’s also actually a federal agent in disguise,
filming you and everyone else in your residence to build a case
against you? That sounds pretty paranoid, but it’s exactly what
happened to several men who were arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada at
the Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino.

In June, FBI agents
teamed up with a hotel employee to deliberately disconnect the
Internet to rooms occupied by eight men allegedly participating in
an illegal betting ring, including Paul “Wei Sing” Phua, who is
allegedly a “high-ranking member” of the organized crime group 14K
Triad. The agents entered the rooms with the employees help and
filmed the interiors in order to build evidence against the
group.

Whether Phau and seven other men are guilty is yet to be
determined, and Phua’s lawyer says it’s beside the point; The case
should be thrown out. The men didn’t consent to searches of their
hotel rooms, but the hotel employee allowed the FBI into the rooms
anyway, a clear violation the defendants’ Fourth Amendment rights,
which protect people from unwarranted searches and seizures.

Furthermore, the attorney
writes in a motion to suppress the fruits of the warrantless
search. “It is apparent that the agents themselves harbored grave
doubts about the constitutionality and legality of what they were
doing, because they engaged in an extraordinary cover up.” All of
the information about the plot – the use of video cameras, the
coordination among federal and state agencies and a hotel employee,
the deliberate disabling of the Internet connection in order to
enter the rooms (despite the fact the connection couldn’t even
really be repaired from the inside) –
were all omitted when the FBI later submitted a probable cause
warrant. Instead, they “falsely characterized the warrantless
searches … as if the agents had responded to an actual outage.”

The movants have been unable to find a single time in which any
law enforcement agency in the country has ever resorted to using a
scheme like this one. … Unsurprisingly, every court to consider
anything remotely similar has found it flagrantly
unconstitutional.

The defendant argues that “if the court authorizes this
duplicity, the government will be free to employ similar schemes in
virtually every context” and that “our lives cannot be private… if
each physical connection that links our homes to the outside world
doubles as a ready-made excuse for the government to conduct a
secret, suspicionless, warrantless search.”