ACLU seeks records on ’suspicionless’ laptop searches
Published: June 10, 2009
Updated 5 months ago
The American Civil Liberties Union is attempting to discover the degree to which Constitutional protections are being violated by a US government policy allowing border officials to search the laptops and other electronic devices of travelers even in the absence of any reason for suspicion.
Last July, Customs and Border Protection — which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — issued a policy (pdf) allowing it to conduct suspicionless border searches of “documents, books, pamphlets, and other printed material, as well as computers, disks, hard drives, and other electronic or digital storage devices.”
The announced purpose of the searches was to counter such crimes as terrorism, drug smuggling, child pornography and copyright violations.
The ACLU has now filed a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) to discover what impact that policy has had on travelers. According to ACLU staff attorney Larry Schwartztol, “Based on current CBP policy, we have reason to believe innumerable international travelers — including U.S. citizens — have their most personal information searched by government officials and retained by the government indefinitely.”
The ACLU is seeking information about the extent to which documents and electronic devices have been retained and possibly disseminated to other government agencies or outside entities, as well as on any complaints about the policy filed by affected individuals.
It is also particularly interested in discovering the criteria by which travelers are chosen for these searches because of its concern that “granting CBP agents unbridled discretion to conduct suspicionless searches also raises a serious risk of discriminatory enforcement against racial and religious minorities.”
When the policy was first announced in 2008, Senator Russ Feingold described it as “truly alarming.” The Canadian Bar Association even warned that the “new U.S. border security policy poses a potential threat to solicitor-client privilege,” and went so far as to recommend that lawyers cross the border with a “forensically clean” laptop and download necessary data at their destination through a secure private network.
According to ACLU attorney Catherine Crump, the CBP policy potentially violates both Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure and First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and association.
“These highly intrusive government searches into a traveler’s most private information, without any reasonable suspicion, are a threat to the most basic privacy rights guaranteed in the Constitution,” states Crump. “Searching or retaining a traveler’s personal information — especially the vast stores of information contained in a laptop or other electronic storage device — could also have a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas and beliefs.”
The ACLU press release can be read here.
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Looks like the ACLU is the lone bastion of freedom fighters left in the world. Godspeed good lawyers!
Except if you call them bad names and they sue you for hundreds of thousands of dollars for hurting their feelings.
4th Reich, unconstitutional searches and seizures.
In the name of the “War on Terror”™, the “War on Drugs”™, and “Save The Children”™ the plantations are constructed.
But - once the slave camps are finished, you populate them however ye may.
Security guide to customs-proofing your laptop
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9892897-38.html
They can download all of your cell phone and laptop data quickly and easily.
Look at The Stick and Device Seizure on this site:
http://www.paraben-forensics.com/
Use TrueCrypt and you won’t have to worry about anything. Free and open-source.
http://www.truecrypt.org
What are you TERRORISTS hiding? You must be up to something with your encrypted information. Your gonna get extraordinarily renditioned to some desert prison planet. “Vee hav vays uf meking you talk”
use hushmail.com for encrypted email, no searches without a judge approved warrant!
natty, you are so right. I wish I had given the ACLU, of which I am a member, the $1,000 I gave to the Obama campaign because I thought he would turn the country around. As someone has said, the only client of the ACLU is The Bill of Rights.
Are you kidding? They can download an exact duplicate of my hard drive while I’m on the internet typing this. Plus any hard drive connected to my network. Yet they also need to rape us at the border. My sensitive files are in the “Attorney/client priviledge” folder but that shouldn’t stop them. Please, everyone give it up for “Carnivore”. And if you don’t know what that is, google- carnivore computer government.