I don't think there's anything odd about this at all. It will just be the case that someone looked at the figures, said "Oh, it's interesting that there were more searches in February 2017 than in 2015 overall" and ran with that figure. It's a more interesting comparison than "There was an increase of 142% year-on-year" or whatever the actual figures are.

Full Quote: "But cellphone searches by the Department of Homeland Security have exploded in 2017 — DHS officials searched more phones in February of this year than in all of 2015. (Four members of Congress introduced a bill this week that would require agents to obtain a warrant before searching a U.S. citizen’s electronic device.)

President Trump’s new security regime wastes yet more of our time and our taxpayer money and shows outright scorn for the spirit of the 4th Amendment."

The article is making it look like this is due to Trump, but if there was an ongoing increase for 2 years under Obama that would be manipulative.

It also needs to be normalized with how many people are crossing the border. Did international travel "explode" as well? I have no idea. Absolute numbers don't really mean anything here. The rate is what matters.

If you're going to throw out all these unlikely theories why don't you look up the data and see if there is any reason to believe them? I'd bet dollars to doughnuts there were not more foreign visitors to the United States in February than there were throughout the entirety of 2015.

Rates and statistics matter. News organizations tend to pick out whatever statistic meets their narrative (just look up all the analysis of the pay gap but that's a whole nother can of worms). Are more phones entering the country? Are more phones entering from countries that should have additional screening? Just saying it's absolutely gone up doesn't reflect the true situation.

Uh huh. Maybe that's it. Everyone started carrying ten phones.

Perhaps the data was more readily available. Perhaps it made a stronger case for the comparison. Is there some drastic change between 2015 and 2016 I don't know about?

I don't know. It is possible, but it is strange that we would have this monthly number, but not have it available for the last year, but then have the previous year.

It means that while Feb 2017 had a lot of searches, it didn't have as many as 2016 as a whole. It did have more than 2015 as a whole.