The Washington Post published an article about two policies issued by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies. According to those policies border agents can seize any electronic devices, including but not limited to notebooks, PDAs or storage devices and any form of documentation and paper, even in written form, without suspicion for an undisclosed amount of time.
They may also send the data to other agencies and even private entities “for language translation, data decryption or other reasons”. This policies do not only affect foreign visitors of the United States but also United States citiziens.
The data has to be destroyed after the review and private entities have to send the data back to the agencies. Everything that has been documented however does not have to be deleted.
“They’re saying they can rifle through all the information in a traveler’s laptop without having a smidgen of evidence that the traveler is breaking the law,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Notably, he said, the policies “don’t establish any criteria for whose computer can be searched.”
This in effect means that even if you cause no suspicion you can have your electronic devices and papers seized and will have to wait a long time before you can get them back. Think of business plans, private videos and photos, electronic diaries not only of “how to build an a-bomb in seven days” type of material. Frightening it is.
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Those who would give up essential Liberty..
This is completely insane.
The U.S. has ceased to be a democracy. I guess its an Idiocracy now…
At least those who thought of something that stupid hadn’t heard about Internet yet.
Any TCP/IP packet passing US border can be sized without suspicion… :)
Looks like its time we need to put all our data on the cloud ;)
@Rarst: But that isnt effective. Can they hold somebody outside US that way ?
This makes them catch everybody. I guess Indians will have a bad time . at least 70% of the software used in India are illegal
The without suspicious is a paradox, if they don’t have suspicion why would they take your laptop in the first place. I don’t mind because if I need to take a laptop I ship an harddrive to the US first. Most of the complainers are just worried the agents are going to find their CP and Pirate Software/Movie/Music.
>But that isnt effective.
Of course it isn’t. Such policies are about seizing power when they can get it, not about actually fighting terrorism or some other crap (whatever the current trend is).
>The without suspicious is a paradox, if they don’t have suspicion why would they take your laptop in the first place.
Because they don’t like your face. Very solid argument for lots of people (no matter what the country is btw).
On topic – data searches are one thing (if you really want to hide data they’d have to search every single byte and could still miss it) but seizing actual hardware sucks.
The without suspicion paradox is bullsh*t. Shipping by Fedex would be worth not losing a $2k investment.
Like they say, if that is not police state – tell me what is police state.
Its not about piracy concerns. Its more of privacy concerns. I would not like anyone going through my laptop contents, esp. without suspicion (read “probable cause”). I have a lot of personal stuff in there including, but not limited to personal communication, financial records, health records, patentable ideas/concepts, proprietary source code (ya… I’m a software guy) and more.
Rarst is correct… this is not about terrorism. Its about creating and using paranoia to seize power.
Ever since 9/11, asians and middle-eastern people have been facing a hell of a time with border security agents in the US (my last trip to the US, I observed 17 people being pulled out for “random” security checks at JFK… only all 17 were asian!!!).
After this, I don’t think I would ever want to travel to the US!!!
It has all gone way out of control. The spread of fascism in the so called “liberal democraacies” is the scourge of our time. Nostalgically I look back to the good old days when the Soviet Union still existed and the West had to maintain a core of civil and human rights to distinguish itself.
Police State. Heil!