Customs Agents taking our data!

'It Is Clear Most People Regard This as a Serious Privacy Invasion'

From Senate panel questions border agents' seizure of laptops

U.S. border agents are copying and seizing the contents of laptops, cell phones and digital cameras from U.S. and foreign travelers entering the United States, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.

The extent of this practice is unknown despite requests to the Department of Homeland Security from the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and several nonprofit agencies.

The department also declined to send a representative to the hearing. Subcommittee Chairman Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Homeland Security had told him that its "preferred" witness was unavailable Wednesday.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. - the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

What is private any more? The L.A. Times has a personal story today in Laptop seizures at customs raise outcry;

Bill Hogan was returning home to the U.S. from Germany in February when a customs agent at Dulles International Airport pulled him aside. He could reenter the country, she told him. But his laptop couldn't.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said he had been chosen for "random inspection of electronic media," and kept his computer for about two weeks, recalled Hogan, 55, a freelance journalist from Falls Church, Va.

Fortunately, it was a spare computer that had little important information. But Hogan felt violated.

"It's not an inspection. It's a seizure," he said. "What do they do with it? I assume they just copy everything."

Yesterday it was admitted that Customs Agents Copy Travelers' Laptop, Phone Data but it is no big deal anymore;

"It is clear most people regard this as a serious privacy invasion," an attorney who litigates on technology issues, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights. "People keep their lives on these devices."

Courts have allowed the border searches based on the premise that a computer is no different than the luggage or other personal effects hauled through customs every day.

"Officials can search mail, they can search address books, they can search photo albums at the border, with no suspicion at all. Why should the rule change when we keep our correspondence, contacts, and pictures on a laptop?" a law professor at George Mason University, Nathan Sales, said. Searches of laptops at airports have proved particularly useful in snaring travelers involved in child pornography.

Is suspicion-less searches of laptops all about child pornography from abroad? Or is it all about harassment and just big brother watching over you?

Senator Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat who called the hearing, said Muslim and South Asian travelers seem to be the most frequent targets for electronics searches and intrusive questioning. "Travelers are asked why they chose to convert to Islam, what they think about Jews, and their views of the candidates in the upcoming elections. This questioning is deeply disturbing in its own right," the senator said.

But there is some good news. American businesses don't like it because it may set a bad example for China;

Muslim and civil liberties groups complaining about the searches have found an ally in corporate America. "The copying and retention of sensitive business information imposes both personal and economic hardship on business travelers and their corporations," Susan Gurley of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives told the panel. She said some executives are now using "scrubbed computers" solely for foreign travel.

If corporate America doesn't like it there is a chance that we may get some of our privacy back.