The ACLU doesn’t like that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection can search through all your electronic personal effects—laptops, including all the data therein—so it has filed a lawsuit to back up an earlier Freedom of Information request asking, essentially, “what gives?” Is it reasonable for Customs to search you at the border? Sure. But is it reasonable for Customs to search you, then take away your laptop, hold onto it for an indeterminate length of time, all the while rifling through your browser history, photo directory, etc? Are they afraid of my exploding plain text files or something?
Never mind the holes in the logic of Customs. “Let’s search their laptops as they’re entering the country, make sure they don’t have dangerous and/or terrorist-related materials on their laptop.” Why would a terrorist, if he were so inclined, locally store all sorts of damaging material as he’s crossing the border? Why wouldn’t he, say, cross the border clean as a whistle, go to Best Buy, buy a cheap computer, then connect to TerroristNet from the comfort of his hotel room? (TerroristNet could, of course, be something as common as Google Docs, so let’s ban/search everyone’s account there, too.)
Then, of course, you’ve got the “but you have nothing to hide, why should you care?” Because I’d like to pretend that, as an American citizen, I shouldn’t have to surrender my MacBook when returning from EVIL VENEZUELA (where I have family, thank you very much), and wait for Some Guy to “approve” my browser history, make sure I don’t have anything suspicious on there. If I were up to no good abroad, you can be sure that I’d have wiped the drive clean before heading to the airport. It’s just common sense.
I agree completely. This is one of the most dangerous policies threatening the first amendment currently in practice. I don’t really understand border law well enough to know whether the ACLU will win (my understanding is that basically there are no rights at the border) but I can definitely support the ACLU’s challenge to the policy, and if they lose it’s one policy I’d like to see reversed immediately. Even before the suit has taken its course, actually.
4th amendment.
Searches at the border are exempted from 4th amendment protections.
And shouldn’t be.
I meant first amendment – freedom of speech and freedom of assembly encompass the right to read,write and communicate privately.
“Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one’s own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.” – US Supeme Court decision by Justice Marshall, Stanley vs Georgia
I would just put a dead battery in and say it doesn’t turn on.
So you would want them to seize your computer, remove the drive and mount it on another system?
This is another veiled attempt to fight piracy on behalf of corporations. It has very little if anything to do with security.
It is ineffectual in both cases either way and its most certainly an invasion of privacy without merit.
It’s about time! This has been going on for a while. More than one friend of mine has been asked to log in and let someone randomly snoop around their laptop.
It’s just another act in the “Security Theater” we call the TSA.