Laptops Can Be Searched At the Border

Nothing to Declare notes that a California appeals court has unanimously upheld a ruling that border security officers at international airports can search personal computers without requiring any specific evidence of criminal activity. The appeal was made by US resident Michael Timothy Arnold, charged with child pornography offenses after an airport search of his notebook PC in 2005. Might want to think hard about what's on your laptop if you're going to be passing through a US international airport.

Comments

I Wonder

[OS24Ever]

It makes you wonder that if there hadn't been something like Child Porn on there if this would have been overruled.

If it'd been a violation of rights search where they searched and you sued just for that with no criminal conviction.

The sad part, is this sets a president if it is allowed to stand, and whittles away at everything else.

Re:I Wonder

[the_skywise]

It makes you wonder if Slashdot would've even posted something like this if it didn't involve computers...
FTFA:

"Arnold has failed to distinguish how the search of his laptop and its electronic contents is logically any different from the suspicionless border searches of travelers' luggage that the Supreme Court and we have allowed," wrote Justice Diarmuid O'Scannlain.

Is searching the files on a laptop when entering the country any different from searching paper files in a briefcase at the border?

Re:I Wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't carry drugs or bombs on a hard disk.

Re:I Wonder

[unlametheweak]

You can't carry drugs or bombs on a hard disk. Yes, but you can carry ideas, perversions, business contacts, dirty pictures, and trade secrets. All of these are of interest to inquiring minds.

So it doesn't really matter if privacy is violated as long as the government gets to meet its agenda.

Re:I Wonder

[MenTaLguY]

You can't carry drugs or bombs in paper files either. Except maybe LSD.

Re:I Wonder

[ender-]

...

I'm guessing they equated this search with looking through a suitcase, finding a suspicious envelope, which when opened contained child porn photos or film. ... I have to ask. What constitutes a 'suspicious' envelope in a suitcase? Lets say I have a suitcase containing my clothes, and I have a letter-sized manila envelope laid on top of the clothes. Shy of a big "My kiddie porn" written in sharpie across the face of the envelope, what would make that envelope more suspicious than any other envelope? How is this determined?

I suppose if the envelope is sneaking around, glancing furtively and acting paranoid, I maybe could see describing it as 'suspicious'. Otherwise they are just opening random envelopes. Nothing suspicious about them at all.

Re:I Wonder

[vortechs]

Interesting - nobody ever drops a laptop while on a business trip and brings it back with them to get it repaired in the States? That's certainly what I would have done...

Re:I Wonder

[rmccann]

You can make a horror film without killing someone. In order to make a child porno film, you have to sexually abuse a child.

Re:I Wonder

[unlametheweak]

You can make a horror film without killing someone. In order to make a child porno film, you have to sexually abuse a child. Wrong! And I smell hypocrisy here; you are implying that the movie with violence can be simulated and the one with sex cannot. Also, I can only presume you are equating sex with "abuse" (I use quotes here because it is a vague word that is used only for political reasons. The very use of the word itself is a Troll).

So right now in Ontario, Canada the award winning film the Tin Drum was recently classified as "child pornography" (a film I happened to have watched (legally) on Canadian television when I was a child). This is an example of morality being adopted into law. If I was to impose my own morals on people then parents who expose their children to religion would be put in jail for their perversions. It's lucky for those parents that I neither have the power or hypocrisy to do this.

Re:I Wonder

[Grishnakh]

By making child porn illegal, you reduce the demand for it and thus reduce the supply as well.

That concept worked really well during Prohibition, didn't it?

Re:I Wonder

[IgnoramusMaximus]

As others have already pointed out, that is not true.

Furthermore, all "child pornography" (whatever the definition) is "illegal". In some places that definition includes fantasies such as hand drawn cartoons and stories.

Also, while on the subject of "child pornography", what is it exactly? When does a subject cease to be a "child" and become an "adult"? Most countries use a self-contradictory, hypocritical and obviously (to any thinking person) bogus scheme: one day you are a feeble-minded minor who is to be protected from evils of tobacco, alcohol and sex and just about a millisecond later (at the stroke of a clock on your birthday) you are a full-fledged, strong-willed, responsible "adult" who can participate in a televised orgy while boozed out of his/her mind. Logical, no?

Not to mention that in many countries you are old enough to serve in the army, go slaughter other people, witness unspeakable horrors of war and be subjected to them ... and yet you are not old enough to bang someone 5 years older then you. Say nothing of alcohol.

"Hypocrisy" is a word too weak for this nonsense, which most people accept without blinking or giving a second thought about it.

"Think of the children!" was always a rallying cry of every description of scoundrel and authoritarian since times immemorial.

In my view the problem of child abuse is far more complicated then this simplistic bureaucratic idiocy is trying to make it out to be and it revolves around a definition of consent and an ability to consent. But that is a whole other discussion. Pictures and other forms of information have very little to do with any of this, other then to serve as a focus of wrath of various power-hungry political charlatans and authoritarians (many of whom are secretly collecting the very pictures).

Re:I Wonder

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Child porn is real evidence of underage children being victimized.

As I already pointed out, not necessarily. "Child porn", by the current legal "definition", includes things such as 3D animations, hand drawn cartoons, Photoshopped photos etc. All of which is illegal.

Furthermore, by the time it reaches some random laptop after circling the bowels the Internet for years, the odds of it being useful in tracking down the source are slim at best. And since when do we lock up people who are merely in posession of an "evidence" of a crime, almost certainly commited by another person?

Also, define "underage" in some logical terms not involving a "child" becoming and "adult" in a less-then-millisecond interval at the midnight of one of his/her birthdays.

Rambo is a fictional movie, in case you weren't aware, maybe it was your own fantasies that got a little bit out of control if you thought for a second they were the same.

Insulting me will not change the fact that these "laws" (and those who make and defend them) are utterly hypocritical and illogical.

Re:I Wonder

[Jesus_666]

The solution is simple: Only take things you absolutely have to when you go or from to the United States. Data doesn't have to travel with you; you can either transmit it in and out of the country via VPN or have a logistics service transport the hard drive to your destination in a parcel. Laptops shouldn't cross the border. Electronic devices shouldn't, as well. Maybe an iPod or an NDS, but still it'd be better to travel without them.

Just assume that every additional item you bring with you will be seen as an additional potential bomb/hidden weapon/evil secret data storage device. America is a fearful place; no need to further scare them by bringing gadgets with you.

Re:I Wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the very LAST thing you want to happen if you were hoping to get through Customs quickly .

...

Just don't do it, because it will make my life and your life easier.

That's what the majority of Americans give up their rights for: quicker and easier.

Time to think

[Jason1729]

Might want to think hard about what's on your laptop if you're going to be passing through a US international airport.

Might want to think hard about making a trip to the states even if you don't have anything untoward on your laptop.

Re:Time to think

[Hatta]

Funny though, our stature in the world seems to be declining along with our freedom. Eventually we'll have none of either left, and the world will continue without us.

4th Amendment...

[Delwin]

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. " I can see them checking your person before getting on a plane to make sure you're not carrying weapons... but what on your laptop could possibly endanger an airplane?

Re:4th Amendment...

[Kohath]

You don't have a 4th Amendment right to cross the US border.

As a condition of allowing you to cross the border, you are subject to search. It is as simple as that.

All governments have always rightfully had the power to control traffic across their borders.

Re:4th Amendment...

[Solandri]

Think about going through international customs at any major airport. You go through US customs after you've already landed. The point is to control smuggling of goods into the US, not to protect airplanes.

I agree, but that reasoning only works for physical goods. If I'm trying to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., then yeah searching me at the border could stop me. But we're talking about data - ones and zeros. If I'm trying to smuggle it into the U.S., I don't need to carry it on my laptop, I could just email it to someone already in the U.S. Or leave it on a server outside the U.S., enter the U.S., open an SSH tunnel to the server, and ftp the files over.

On the plus side...

[Wordplay]

This should cause a nice bump for encrypted drive/volume software.

It's a real shame this revolved around a kiddie porn case that hinged on the admissibility of the evidence. Nobody wants to let the kiddie porn guy go, so the chances of getting a good precedent here were probably that much lower.

Re:Where and how do they search

[peipas]

And that's the thing. Like the last /. discussion on this, if your hard drive is encrypted can they compel you to provide access as a condition for allowed travel?

What about employees of organizations/in professions that are legally required to protect information?

Be Prepared

[Stavr0]

Idiot got caught with child porn. Zero sympathy here. However it's a slippery slope.

What about software, videos, MP3? What if they want proof of license? They could also decide to download your email inbox and address book. Why? Because They Can.
I know what's going on my laptop next time I cross the border. TrueCrypt. That's what.

Re:Time to Roll Out The Crypto

[gstoddart]

I imagine there's some thinly-parsed definition about whether or not you're officially on US soil when you're entering Customs and, therefore, whether the Fifth Amendment could be said to apply.

Heck, Gonzales once issued a statement once saying that people who haven't cleared customs technically are neither in nor out of the US, and therefore have no actual rights (can't dredge up a reference now). He's certainly said that habeus corpus isn't actually a right.

Basically, for a while at least, the legal opinion was that you could be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained without recourse. You're so far removed from the 5th Amendment at that point, it's not funny!!

Unless things change, you have shockingly few rights at the border -- at least until a court clarifies things.

Cheers

Re:What happens if your laptop is encrypted?

[Futurepower(R)]

The U.S. is becoming a police state, apparently.

Stealing the laptop won't help if they don't have the password.

Truecrypt has the ability to make hidden encrypted partitions.

Digital transport

[rmadmin]

There is actually a pretty easy way around this. (Albeit, there are some variables that effect practicality). If I were to travel across borders and knew I had material I did not want seen (private photos? personal docs), I would simply sftp them some place safe and delete them from my hard drive. Once on the other side, I sftp my files back down. The border guards can search until the cows come home for all I care. Screw all that encrypted file system crap. :) PLUS, if my laptop gets broken or stolen, I don't lose all my important docs.

Re:Only on slashdot

[Smauler]

No, movies where people murder people are not illegal to own AFAIK. If so, I and many websites including youtube will be in trouble : One or two examples (if you haven't worked this out, these videos are videos of murders. Don't watch if you don't want to). Possessing video of a crime is definately not necessarily a crime in itself, apart from when it concerns sex.

The situation is this now : It is legal to own actual video of murders. It is illegal for a 17 year old to create a CGI of themselves (or obviously film themselves) and send it to their partner.

People are not defending child pornography here, people are questioning the law. Also, there is such a thing a due process - if you start ignoring it for "really nasty" crimes, eventually you'll start ignoring it for more and more crimes, and your liberties are dwindling at an alarming rate. Just because people question the process doesn't mean they are defending the actions uncovered by the process.