I can't join you in saying it's "wrong" because it's perfectly legal what they're doing in most cases. If someone thinks they've been unlawfully deprived, I suppose they can file a civil rights claim. Until that happens, my view of border searches as far as the law goes is that pretty much anything goes.

Absent truly abusive practices, which would be beyond someone being simply inconvenienced, I don't really see a huge issue here.

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I am interested in how this plays out. Two things stand out, in particular. Midtown is absolutely correct about the Constitution and the border. People tend to have no idea that at the border, the government can do a lot more in terms of searches/seizures and it's constitutional. Darn near all bets are off, relative to other locations. You really can't compare border searches to other things such as check points or entry into homes or businesses.

The second is that digital technology is one of those things that the government is struggling to figure out how to address. I wouldn't want to lose my computer, either. I am not sure how they can figure out how to keep things safe and allow commerce to continue where so many people are, in essense, hauling their office around with them. Like I said, I am interested in how this plays out.

You guys seem to miss the point.

I can pick up a new laptop from walmart for $225.

Society changes a lot in 20, 40, 60, 80, a million years, but the government will STILL have your data.

Do you trust the government to never let your data slip out to someone else?

Do you trust the government to protect the integrity of the data over a long period of time and not let someone modify what was on your drive many years ago?

This is like letting the government just have your house to search through forever when they have a warrent, that is crazy.

If they want to search for contraband, they should do it with you there and no data shall copied off of your laptop. I would rather wait 4 hours for them to analyze my drive with me there and to know that I wouldn't have to worry about the data being used against my great grandchildren.

Well, I am not sure it is missing the point when the topic of this thread is homeland security and the constitution. Something is either constituional or it is not.

If it is not constitutional, our system is set up to work that out within the courts. Like Midtown said, the remedy in a system of laws is to file a lawsuit.

If it IS constitutional, we either respect the constitution because we are a country that respects the law, thank goodness, or we change the constitution. Of course, changing the constitution is going to be difficult when you are talking about security on the border.

I suppose a third option is to put pressure on the agency to not exercise its rights under the constitution.

To ignore the constitution because we don't like it is a slipperly slope. I think this is a topic of legitimate debate to clear the air and allow all the parties to educate each other regarding what the law allows/requires vs. what the people want. It is absolutely imperative, to my way of thinking, for people to understand what is and is not constitutional. An educated population makes all the difference. It is not enough to simply dislike the results. It is not until it is established whether something is constitutional or not that lawful and legal responses can take place.

Ignoring the law is a step towards savagery. Changing an unpopular law is the civilized response.

Go read the memos and get back to us. If no evidence of a crime is found, the data must be deleted per the government's own policy. Constitutionally, they probably don't have to do that, but they are in order to protect privacy.

There hasn't been a case of it yet, at least not one involving data being evaluated by Immigration/Customs (ICE). Now, if it's my personal information and the V.A., no thanks

The policy tells ICE officials that they have a "reasonable" amount of time. Actually, that is no different than searching your house. In home searches, the government has as long as it needs to check every place where the evidence sought might be found. You'd have to actually look at the warrant, then look at the house to figure out how long that'd be. If they were searching my apartment for a body, they'd be in and out of my apartment in 30 seconds. If they were searching for an SD card, they might be here all day, tearing up carpet and such.

The same probably holds true with computers. If the computer is my school computer, a "reasonable" period of time wouldn't be very long. They'd also have to coordinate (per their policy) with the DOJ because some stuff on my laptop is subject to attorney-client privilege, so that might take a bit longer.

If I was some IT privacy freak and had my drive encrypted 'til hell won't have it and refused to supply the keys, it could be a long, long time before I saw my hardware again.

Really, when evaluating the reasonableness of the duration of the search, the rules are the same per this memo as they'd be in the search of your home.

Read the policy. Not gonna happen. Not unless you're crossing the border with terrorist plans, drug cartel correspondence or pirated software on your 'puter.

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Oh ya, I am sure they delete the data when they determine there is no crime.

lol, you couldn't prove it either way.

However, I am not just going to accept it solely on faith though. Next time I leave the country, I am physically destroying my drive before I get on the plane to come back.

Don't challenge me about proof. I don't usually say stuff unless I have it. Here's one article: Privacy Vs. Border Security: Critics Say Laptop Searches Cross the Line
It was referenced through an aggregated article on Inside Higher Ed.

Here's an article that appeared just this past Thursday (August 14, 2008) in the Green Bay newspaper:
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/...=2008808140621

And here's my personal favorite, an article that came out just last week, where the Feds are finally admitting that they do this. I pulled this one from the Buffalo News, but it appeared in a lot of different places. I believe I probably saw it first on the ABC news website.
Feds holding laptops : Opinion : The Buffalo News

That is the sickening part.

Just like the illegal wiretaps and everything else, they only seem to admit to something when confronted and they have to anyway.

What else haven't they admitted to?

10 years ago, only crazy people thought this way...

Welcome to the 21st century, indeed.

Why??

Really, are you committing a crime? Are you smuggling contraband software? No? Then worst case scenario, you're deprived of your system for a short time. That likely will not happen though.

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Your first article's writer seems to fundamentally misunderstand what is allowable at borders. That's almost shocking considering he cites to a recent 9th Circuit (!!!) case which ruled these searches Constitutional. He also hasn't read the memos.

The policy is that the data is supposed to be deleted. Of course, if the data isn't deleted, there's no way to force the government to do so, but at the very least, anything found there could never be used against you.

The article focuses a lot on the anecdotal evidence spouted off by one traveler, a Muslim who makes frequent trips to Europe. Gee.. I wonder why ICE is suspicious of this person? Every foreign terrorist to ever hit the U.S. (since WWII) has fit that profile, so why on Earth shouldn't the feds be looking that direction? It would be frightening if they weren't.

I don't even know why you quoted this one. Was this one of the first three things which came up in Google?? I think everyone agrees that things are being confiscated sometimes. It's whether or not those things are being returned within a reasonable time frame which matters. This editorial basically says that it doesn't like the practice and that there should be legislation to stop this practice [and make the borders less secure].

Another editorial. Again, it makes no specific allegations which would lead anyone with a working understanding of Constitutional Law to think that there's anything unconstitutional happening. Just more useless bellyaching about the Bush administration, i.e., if Bush has sponsored something, it must be bad.

This is actually probably the least compelling (IMHO) of any of the three links you posted, none of which prove that there is anything being held for an unreasonable amount of time or that data which is supposed to be deleted per the policy is not being deleted. Reading these editorials, I get the sense that none of these writers have even read the ICE policies.

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Your first article's writer seems to fundamentally misunderstand what is allowable at borders. That's almost shocking considering he cites to a recent 9th Circuit (!!!) case which ruled these searches Constitutional. He also hasn't read the memos.

The policy is that the data is supposed to be deleted. Of course, if the data isn't deleted, there's no way to force the government to do so, but at the very least, anything found there could never be used against you.

The article focuses a lot on the anecdotal evidence spouted off by one traveler, a Muslim who makes frequent trips to Europe. Gee.. I wonder why ICE is suspicious of this person? Every foreign terrorist to ever hit the U.S. (since WWII) has fit that profile, so why on Earth shouldn't the feds be looking that direction? It would be frightening if they weren't.

I don't even know why you quoted this one. Was this one of the first three things which came up in Google?? I think everyone agrees that things are being confiscated sometimes. It's whether or not those things are being returned within a reasonable time frame which matters. This editorial basically says that it doesn't like the practice and that there should be legislation to stop this practice [and make the borders less secure].

Another editorial. Again, it makes no specific allegations which would lead anyone with a working understanding of Constitutional Law to think that there's anything unconstitutional happening. Just more useless bellyaching about the Bush administration, i.e., if Bush has sponsored something, it must be bad.

This is actually probably the least compelling (IMHO) of any of the three links you posted, none of which prove that there is anything being held for an unreasonable amount of time or that data which is supposed to be deleted per the policy is not being deleted. Reading these editorials, I get the sense that none of these writers have even read the ICE policies.

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Sorry - didn't mean to be so abrasive with my earlier answer.

For this kind of research, I don't do Google. I used REAL databases and then went to the newspaper sites to get the publicly accessible versions of these articles. I did, however, pull these rather quickly. I'll find you some more tomorrow, when I have more time. The first article, I pulled deliberately because it was anecdotal. The third, I didn't notice was an editorial, but I will find the original ABC news article. I have it quoted on another forum. It was not, I can assure you, an editorial.

So here's that original ABC News story, which is a Reuters wire story, not an opinion piece.

Here's one from the LA Times:

Laptop seizures at customs raise outcry
I pulled this quote out of the article: "Of the 100 people who responded to a survey the association did in February, seven said they had been subject to the seizure of a laptop or other electronic device." Not inspection. Seizure.

Another quote: "Courts consistently have ruled that there's no need for warrants or suspicions when a person is seeking to enter the country -- agents can search belongings, including computer gear, for any reason."

And another one: "Any routine search is considered "reasonable" under the 4th Amendment, legal scholars agree."

Here's one from the San Francisco Chronicle in April outlining an appeals court case that gives the okay for customs to search through travelers laptop contents.

And here's one from the New York Times going all the way back to October of 2006, suggesting this has actually been going on for quite some time.

A lot of the evidence and news stories are anecdotal because the travel forums and blogs have been talking about this for a long time. But that Reuters story from just a couple of weeks ago is pretty hard to ignore.

Okay, this article brings absolutely nothing new to the table.

The bit it printed about the survey is laughable. Typically response rates to surveys are extremely low. They would be especially low to those who simply had nothing to report, i.e., my device hasn't been seized. What would probably be more telling would be the 7 responses versus how many individuals were surveyed.

None of these articles really present any damaging or new facts which might change my mind.

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In order for a survey to be considered valid, you have to have a certain minimum number of responses, so I'm not too concerned about what you think is probably a low response. I'm content they got enough responses to make the survey valid. Unless you want to dig up the actual survey and present it here?

You said they can't seize laptops because of the "5th amendment," which only states that private property will not be taken for public use without compensation. I'm not even sure that applies here, depending on what use they had for any laptops that didn't get returned to their owners (and some of them do not get returned to their owners). In any case, I presented you with several articles that say they are taking laptops for search and for seizure, just like you asked. That your mind has been changed or not, or whether I put any "new information on the table" for you, is of little concern to me. You asked for proof. I gave it to you. Whether you like the examples I gave or not is your concern.

It didn't say whether the survey was "valid," and there's no such thing as a magic number of responses to make a survey "valid." The article didn't even mention the medium. For all you know, it could have been a poll posted on an internet message board.

You're getting the Constitutional Law wrong. Yes, the 5th Amendment might apply here, but really, this is probably more of a 4th Amendment issue if it is anything at all.

The Supreme Court has ruled that warrantless searches without probable cause or suspicion are just fine. If an individual in a border search refuses to give up their password (which is fine), the government's right to search the laptop does not evaporate. The government now will proceed to "plan B" which involves shipping your computer off to another government agency where your laptop will sit in a pile, eventually be cracked, evaluated, and if nothing is found, returned to you and the data deleted.

A 5th Amendment issue might arise here if the time the government takes to evaluate your computer exceeds what is reasonable, but nowhere in any of your articles has that allegation been made.

Further, if the government finds so much as one pirated piece of software on your laptop, it can be, and probably will be seized as property used in the commission of a crime. You have no recourse there except to sue the government for the property -- probably not worth it unless you know for a fact that you're innocent. The government doesn't even have to charge you with a crime, and in most cases, folks just say "It's not mine!"

The "seizure" is a temporary one if no evidence of a crime is found. None of your articles say that the reasonableness threshold has ever been crossed -- just that searches are happening. I never denied that.

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The only thing that is a crime just to HAVE on your computer is child pornography. There is NO software that is illegal to bring into America.

If we were just looking for stuff that is a crime, this would have nothing to do with terrorism at all and we are not any safer.

The "if you have nothing to hide why worry" line is BS. They might as well stop you and photocopy every letter you have on you and any journals you may be writing in as while as making a copy of the contact list on your telephone.

If you have no illegal phone numbers on your telephone, the worst case scenario is that you're deprived of your telephone for a short time.

I thought you were in IT. Perhaps you need to take a refresher course on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). If your software has anything on it which gets around Digital Rights Management (DRM) (, e.g., cracked computer games or MS Office with serial numbers you got from an IRC group, then you're sunk.

Further, evidence of actual criminal conspiracy is illegal as well.

At the border, the ICE can do this as well.

ICE would most likely be looking for matches to certain other phone numbers known to be used by the bad guys. That alone could be shared with other governmental entities and lead to solving crimes.

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Oh great, the big bad government is going to stop people who sneak by with cracks for Halo 3.

I bet that will stop 911.

I hope the government stops people who also violate the DMCA by bring aftermarket toner cartridges in to the country. While they are at it, they should double check to make sure each mp3 on our ipod was purchased!

You can say whatever you want about the DMCA(one of the most retarded laws on the books), but no one has been convicted in a criminal court of having a cracked computer game or a serial number for MS Office on their computer.

Yet it's a law on the books. Are you suggesting we should ignore the law because it is, in your opinion, a bad law?

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I'm not saying we should ignore it.. I am saying that unless you can go to jail for it, it is not a crime.

Speeding 10 mph over the limit is illegal, but it isn't a crime.

I haven't yet graduated from law school, but I can tell you for a fact that you're wrong.

A crime occurs any time one breaks the law. It is a pretty simple concept, actually

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So all the people I saw going to work on the hefner parkway this morning are criminals according to you? I bet you would love some Ayn Rand.