Groups Want Congressional Hearings On Border Laptop Searches

May 1st, 2008
www.arstechnica.com
By: Nate Anderson

Earth - When a Mexican press aide scooped up the BlackBerrys of several US officials this week and attempted to take them out of the country, Secret Service agents intercepted him before he could get on his plane and demanded the devices be returned. BlackBerrys and other portable electronics now carry so much information that they can be a gold mine to those who have a chance to look through them. But it's not just Mexican diplomatic officials who would like a peek inside such devices; the US Border Patrol has been exercising its right to search the contents of any laptop or electronic device entering or leaving the country, and that has some civil liberties groups alarmed.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a letter today on behalf of 40 civil liberties organizations to the head of the House Committee on Homeland Security. The groups want Congress to hold hearings on border searches of laptops and other electronics, searches which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed could proceed without any form of probable cause. The next time you enter the US, Customs and Border Patrol agents legally have the right to take your laptop and rifle through it, and they don't need to give you a reason why.

The letter argues that these sorts of searches can easily become 'abusive' without oversight, and the Department of Homeland Security has refused to release any information about its policies and procedures relating to such searches. Worries about such searches aren't merely hypothetical; laptop searches are happening now (hence the court case) and have been for years. In fact, the Ninth Circuit considered a
similar case back in 2006 and came to the same conclusion.

'In a free society, the government cannot have unlimited power to read, sees, store and use all information on any electronic device carried by any traveler entering or leaving the nation,' says the letter. 'Therefore, Congress must exercise oversight to ensure that border searches are not overly invasive or discriminatory, and establish appropriate safeguards to protect any information collected and maintained by the government.'



This also is not a case where you don't have to worry if you're not a child-porn toting pedophile. All sorts of information could be at risk, including proprietary corporate databases and confidential personnel and financial information carried by executives on their laptops. In fact, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives has even taken to warning its members about the issue, and this is not a group generally known for absurd, scare-mongering black helicopter-type claims.

The rest of the signatories are just as interesting. The usual suspects are present in force: the EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Digital Democracy, etc. Also on the list are groups like the National Center for Transgender Equality, Feminists for Free Expression, the American Association of University Professors, and the ACLU. More conservative groups like the Republican Liberty Caucus and the Rutherford Institute are also present, showing that questions of privacy and civil rights aren't being asked only by one side of the political spectrum.

With the increasing amount of data stored not just on laptops but on even more common devices like cellular phones, now is certainly the time for Congress to look into the issue and for us as a society to think about how we are comfortable with such searches being conducted.