In further evidence of our rapidly eroding civil liberties, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed today that US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have the right to confiscate and search a traveler's laptop or other electronic device
without any suspicion of wrongdoing. The rules -- which we
reported on in February -- allow for searches of hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, and video or audio tapes, and specify that the agencies can "detain" belongings for a "reasonable period of time," (i.e., as long as they please). Additionally, the DHS can share the data found with other government agencies or private entities for translation, decryption, or (astoundingly vague) "other reasons." The DHS says the policies apply to anyone entering the country -- including US citizens -- and claim the measures are necessary to prevent terrorism. In other news, Big Brother issued a statement today guaranteeing a bonus for turning over family members suspected of crimethink to the Thought Police.
[Via
Switched]
posted August 1st 2008 11:01AM
Heh...you missed a few comments, then.
As far as I know... we don't get 4th Amendment Search and Seizure protection at points of entry into a country.
No reasonable expectation of privacy. The govt. can do whatever they want. This is how it has always been as far as I know.
You're saying I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of my laptop that is shut down and in my bag? That's news to me. If you can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your pockets or the trunk of your car, how can you not have the same reasonable expectation in your laptop?
@ Mikey
there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in your pockets when you walk through the airport or customs, which is why they tell you to remove all items from your pockets, not to mention at many airports they now have imaging to see what is inside your clothing.
@ Dave
But they can't seize the stuff in my pockets unless it breaks another rule. i.e. after they inspect it, if they have no probable cause that it is illegal or being used for an illegal purpose, they have to give it back to me.
@Mikey
and I'm sure that's what the Supreme Court will rule on - what constitutes a "reasonable period" of time.
Many European countries face equal terrorist threats and don't stomp on their citizens' freedoms like the U.S..
The U.S. government must have really caused fear in Americans in order to be able to go this far. Remember that Hitler won the support of good-natured Germans for an evil cause. The U.S. is dangerously close, and that is Downright scary for us in the rest of the world!
Apparently you must have forgotten about a lot of Europe...
France has deported two dozen controversial Imams, many of whom were French citizens.
Italy has deported Romanians and required gypsies (those with and without valid Italian passports) to register with the gov't by fingerprint.
The UK has cameras everywhere. Switzerland has a telecommunications surveillance system similar to the NSA's (called Onyx).
Im start to belive on a silent coup d'etat happened several decades ago and now the democrats and republicans are just a puppet of the military&corporate caste.
SHIT!! but in reality, they cant just hack your puter, they would have to remove the password from your person or something, right?
Good times. Happy I don't travel abroad. Wonder what companies with int'l business travelers think about the govt being able to snoop through their company laptops?
You Guys Do Know That We As American Citizens Have The Right To Take Down The Government And Reinstate A New One If Necessary Right?
Don't ever give up your guns then, they will try to take them.
Homosexuality is the solution to all our problems.
In other news: How to get by border security with less stress: Don't have child porn on your laptop. Don't have child porn at all! Get a new hobby! Simple!
Don't break the law, and the law won't break you!
A think the point people are trying to make here is that we shouldn't even have to avoid laws like this, because these laws shouldn't even have been created according to the Fourth Amendment.
The point the founding fathers were making when they put in the 4th amendment is that it should never be easy for the government to search you or seize you or your property for criminal investigations. If the government wants to arrest you for a crime, or if they want to gather your own property as evidence against you, it should have to work for it. If the government is too lazy to put in the effort to find probable cause, it shouldn't be allowed to arrest you.
The easier we allow it to become for the government, the closer we get to an authoritarian state. Sure, we are a long way from Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight against the encroachment on our rights.
This is old news...
Any of you know about the passed North American Union with Canada and Mexico? Also Canadians and Mexicans are not allowed to have guns like we are, and soldiers in certain parts had to sign a paper saying they will FIRE UPON AMERICAN CIVILIANS who do not give up their banned fire arms when the time comes?
I should be able to own an Assault rifle because it's a free country, that's enough reason on it's own. People have forgotten what free means, they think it means "whatever sounds good to me at the current moment". I don't need assault rifles to kill people, there are plenty of other ways. Also, when the law expired, there was no rash of assault rifle attacks either.
Legality often has nothing to do with why people do things. Just like Drug use, as the Dutch have proven, treating addiction as a medical problem and letting people do what they choose with themselves does not equal a national addiction. Their biggest problem is foreigners invading to get things that they should be able to get in their own countries in the first place.
It makes me giggle when I think that all of the major "massacres" in the United States were in "gun-free" zones. Conversly, I challenge you to find even an ATTEMPT of a Columbine scenario at a Gun show or Practice range.
Never happens.
You people need to abandon your pet issues and have a reality check, the science does NOT support your wishy-washy feel-good nanny-state fantasies. The weapons are to protect us from big brother, and if you read the news, we are in dire need of protection.
If you can't store something on your laptop in such a way as to evade the scrutiny of DHS wage-slave homunculus, you deserve a cavity search.
In other news: How to get by border security with less stress: Don't have child porn on your laptop. Don't have child porn at all! Get a new hobby! Simple!
Don't break the law, and the law won't break you!
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That has to be the stupidest thing I have read today. You are so missing the point, that kind of thinking is the exact opposite of what America was founded on. Your making excuses for people who are trampling YOUR OWN rights and giving it a pass just because it hasn't personally inconvenienced you yet. It's like Stockholm's syndrome.
You can't take a pet cause or issue and use as ammo to take aim at very general rights that we are supposed to have. Probable cause is there for a reason. If you allow this kind of thinking to run rampant, you can kiss ALL your rights goodbye because there will always be someone there to twist and contort and issue to erode rights one after the other.
My right to privacy is more important than your feel-good idea that it's ok to invade my life on the off chance that I might get busted on SOMETHING, be it child porn or anything else. We need less laws not more. Child abuse is already illegal, we just have to enforce it. Murder is already illegal, we don't need "hate crime" laws to make it 2x illegal if someone involved happens to not be white.
The only people this is going to hurt is normal citizens, because everyone else is going to take 5 minutes and get Truecrypt and put a 256 Bit AES password on their system, and its over from then on. Plus, why would terrorists have data on their computers at border crossings in the first place? They can simply use free online storage and Truecrypt files to have them accessible to anyone, everywhere, worldwide, with no personal risk to themselves.
If anyone thinks this law is a good idea, then your just too far gone to be helped. Sometimes I can't believe how stupid some "adults" are.
Seriously, anyone who tries that old "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" nonsense is a fucking idiot. OK, so first they sift through your luggage. Fine. Oh, your laptop is confiscated for an undetermined amount of time. Oh, well OK, for the good of the country. Your phone's tapped. Oh, well that's fine I guess....um I don't discuss anything illegal. I can only imagine a lot of these people having no qualms with secret surveillance on the insides of people's homes so long as they can't actually see the fucking cameras, microphones and various sensors and black vans. Who cares if assholes with oodles of authority fuck with you "legally"? Seriously, I'd rather see a million politicians bathe in sulphuric acid than have our country turn into a nannified police state.
It's high time you americans grew some balls and stood up for your rights - that is if you have any left...
As it has been mentioned before, truecrypt with full system partition encryption should do the job in the meantime. Although if NSA really wanted to narrow down a possible key search space they would simply need to look at which keyboard keys on said laptop are used most often...
America is free like free cellphones with contracts.
So, adding "to protect us from terrorism" to anything gives our gov't the right to do what they want. This makes me think that hypothetically, a government worker can come in my house, shit on my carpet, and as long as he says "it was done to protect you from terrorism" its ok. Am I understanding this right?
I'm from Canada and have to travel down to the US for a wedding in November. I was going to bring my laptop down there to hang out online in the hotel, but now I'm not. No, I don't have anything to hide, it's just one more thing that could be a hassle at the airport. Already I've learned never to fly with pants that use a belt to hold them up, or with lace-up shoes. It simply takes too long to take those things off, scan them, and put them on again. Hassle. I will be travelling with my ipod touch, and a thought comes to mind: In Canada, it's not illegal for me to have copies of movies I own on DVD on there (yet). If it gets taken in the US and they find those movies on there, what happens?
Finally, this post has resulted in some of the best (and worst) comments I've ever read on engadget. Kudos to all you people fighting for your lost rights through organisations like the EFF. Some of the best things that your country has done have originated with 'the people'.
What? The Land of the Free? Whoever told you that is your enemy.
that's why we hate in europe more and more the united states.
sorry guys but what's going on over there? are you all speechles or just stupid enough to vote such politicians who design such laws? and even your new "hope" obama is still supporting the death penalty... wtf?! whats going on? just sad...
Where have the forests gone?
Where has the clean air gone?
Where have the beautiful rivers gone?
Where has our freedom gone?
Where has the community gone?
The world is fucked, I hate it. Every day is just a day of battling the stupid people and the problems they cause. Modern society does not function, not for me anyway.
human rights are human rights everywhere, inside the US, around the world, in the borders and airports.
I have live in 3 contries and visit more than 15, and in the only one that have violated my human and civil rights just because I'm not white and don't have and american accent is this one (U.S.A.) and I'm a citizen.
The U.S. is going down the toilet with human and civil rights,
the goverment agencies and their representatives just want to show how much power they have. they are just bullies with guns and badges.
This isn't about security or counter-terrorism as any fool knows, because as a security measure it is so easy to circumvent.
1. Take your secret plans for wold domination and stick them in a TrueCrypt file.
2. Use the 'plausible deniability' option of hiding one TrueCrypt file inside another.
3. Rename your file as Engadget Xmas Shopping List.txt or something.
4. Install DropBox, FolderShare, Mesh or whatever and copy the file up to the cloud.
5. Travel into the US with/without some harmless laptop.
6. Go to your favorite internet cafe/wifi point and download said file.
7. Marvel at the stupidity of US border controls.
- The End -
if you bring a macbook air you can mail it back.... it fits in an envelope
They can't tell that is a laptop and will have to do a search on it.
How about keeping a MicroSD in the spin of a book?
Hey U.S. guys, is it Democracy?
While you buy gadgets, cars or any other money-stuff, your freedom is sold by gov..
from Russia, with love
To everyone out there with the "if you don't have anything to hide, why worry?" philosophy:
What if a new law was passed allowing DHS to give cavity searches to you and your family to and from work/school. Would you be okay with it then? When you, your wife, and your elementary school age kids get probed by the government every day? "Sure, we're being physically violated, but least we're safe from the turrists." It's a slippery slope, friends. But hey, I'm sure it'd be 100% effective.
Personally, I'd rather take my chances that I might be part of the 0.00001% of Americans that actually DIE or are injured each year due to terrorist attacks in our great country. (Actual percentage may vary). Terrorism only works if you're afraid.
so...if they confisticated my mp3 for w/e reason, and found 500 "illegal" mp3s, would they sue the c*** outta me? (nothing else but mp3s)
"Also V Lange, arab terrorists got 99% of their weapons from Russia and China. Unless you see the Taliban with M-16s? Because last time I checked they had AK-47s and AK-74s, and RPGs which the US or any NATO country does not manufacture because they use LAWs or grenade launchers." - Said Dave
The Taliban are not Arab. And they got their weapons from the US to fight the Russians.
I wonder what pork-barrel, fine-print, signing-statement-having rider-to-the-bill this policy rode in on?