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Federal Judge Limits DHS Laptop Border Searches
Declan McCullogh is reporting at CNET that a federal district court judge has rebuked the Department of Homeland Security, "which had claimed it can seize a traveler's laptop and search it six months later without warrant." As described in the article, DHS policies have been stacked against travelers entering the US, including citizens returning from abroad: "There's no requirement that they be returned to their owners after even six months or a year has passed, though supervisory approval is required if they're held for more than 15 days. The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets." This ruling does not address immediate searches at the border, but says that DHS cannot hold computers for indefinite searching, as in the case to hand, concerning a US citizen returning from a trip to Korea, whose laptop was seized and held for months before a search was even conducted on it.
I foresee TrueCrypt's website will be getting a lot of new visitors soon.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
After all the speed at which your nice 3k laptop becomes a paperweight via obsolescence means that a 1 year warrant-less censure effectively fines you what 1k or so without any charge.
I'm glad to see that the law is finally curtailing some of these absurd laws. For the last bunch of years a bunch of draconian policies have been deemed legal "because we say so". It's about fucking time the courts started bitch-slapping these down.
America has become absurd, and many people simply won't go there while it's like this.
I think every country should start doing exactly the same things to all US citizens. Let's see how long it takes before Americans start to complain about being fingerprinted, cavity searched, and arbitrarily detained.
I like most Americans, but your fucking government is out of control.
But for many people the problem is NOT that they have something incriminating on their laptops, but the fact they are taken for soooooooooooo long and not returned. TrueCrypt folders or whatever would most likely cause the powers-that-be to keep the laptop even longer.
Careful What You Wish For....
It still scares me to see how badly the Bush administration has damaged democracy and the American constitution. It will take years, but this is another step away from the proto-fascist path that our country had started down when the far right-wing neocons came to power.
They are still out there. The Supreme Court has been loaded with ideologues and until one of them leaves the bench we are stuck with a judicial system that has been gamed for the sake of the wealthy and well-connected who care nothing for our country's laws and traditions.
Best regards.
Rights are meant to protect you from a corrupt government. It is your duty as an American to resist a corrupt government just as the red coats were removed from this country by force after being told to leave so much for 'violence is never the answer.' Laws that make criminals easier to catch make revolutionaries against corrupt government easier to catch and the only one interested in that are the entrenched corrupt government. Liberties are meant to defend you from your government and should NEVER be surrendered. Violent revolution adds a physical cost to corrupt governance.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
Yeah see, that's where you are wrong. I don't mind inspecting, even reasonable searches, but seizing anything? At least there needs to be a reason like it's contraband or illegal. Seizing equipment because they can is the same thing as stealing private property, and as far as i know that's covered by the 5th amendment of the constitution. You want to take my property? Fine, just provide me with enough cash so that my property, time spent on it and sensitive information on it is completely compensated for.
Rights are meant to protect you from a corrupt government. It is your duty as an American to resist a corrupt government just as the red coats were removed from this country by force after being told to leave so much for 'violence is never the answer.' Laws that make criminals easier to catch make revolutionaries against corrupt government easier to catch and the only one interested in that are the entrenched corrupt government. Liberties are meant to defend you from your government and should NEVER be surrendered. Violent revolution adds a physical cost to corrupt governance.
According to the Constitution there are rights we cannot be forced to give up because they were not given to us by men.
But they were sure taken by force by weak minded men
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
No CDs?? I would like to see the rule on that, that would mean you can't bring music CDs, and you might as well not have CDR disks anyway, if you can't use them while you are out. This doesn't sound legit.
what part of DHS does?
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Except, under Bush's administration, the AG (Gonzales) decided that non-citizens are not eligible for those rights, and that until you've been admitted into the country you exist in a legal limbo whereby they can detain anyone indefinitely without reason or oversight. So, if you're still in customs and haven't been admitted, you're a legal non-entity.
All of the ideals America has espoused for centuries are more or less swept under the carpet in your current security paranoia.
The people making the decisions are ignoring hundreds of years of your own law and principles, and deciding that, "no, that's not what they meant and we are allowed to suspend that". Basically, they've decided they can do anything they want, no matter what the laws and the Constitution says.
Mod this up...
Honestly there is absolutely no point to a laptop search, unless the physical laptop may have been tampered with (which the visual inspection already done for domestic travel would suffice). What keeps someone from putting data onto a memory card and sticking it into their phone / game system / whatever on a hidden partition? Or better yet, using the internet to simply transfer it from a public PC lab outside of the country to a server they set up inside (if they are a returning US citizen it isn't hard to expect them to have a computer already on the inside of the border). The reverse, a visitor could use a public pc lab / free wifi to download whatever from a server in their home country. If the laptop was used for criminal activity worthy of scrutiny, a criminal would simply throw it away and buy a new one (since the activity would certainly have been worth the cost of a new computer, if it was worth searching for to begin with).
Laptop drive/media searches are *entirely* security theater... all it does is cost criminals $400 and everyone else time and dignity...
They weren't taken by force.
They were gleefully surrendered by frightened cowards.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
>>>A country has ALWAYS had the right to fully inspect or seize ANYTHING coming in across its border!
Where in the Constitution was the United States government given that power of unlimited property theft (or limitless imprisonment)??? MY reading of the constitution says the exact opposite (Bill of Rights, sections 5 and 9 and 10).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Ironically, your tagline fits your post "-1 Wrong". The solution you're suggestion is fixing the symptom, NOT the problem. The problem is unreasonable search and seizure. That is the problem we should be tackling.
And you can't even blame "fear of terrorists". We gave away the 4th Amendment for the War on Drugs, and we'll never get it back. The cops can just take your stuff for fun now, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's not even a "border" thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You have to BE here to be receive your guaranteed rights
No, you have your rights no matter where you are. That's why they're called "natural rights"; everyone has them. More to the point, to the extent that someone is acting as an agent of the US government under the authority of the US Constitution their authority is limited to that actually granted by the Constitution. The Constitution does not grant the US government or its agents the authority to perform any search or seizure without a warrant. If anyone were to perform such a search or seizure without a warrant then said search or seizure would be an illegal act under US law, lacking any Constitutional "legitimacy", regardless of where the act takes place.
Whether you can enforce your rights is a different matter, of course. Clearly the US government isn't going to help, but there are other options one can try.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
He has the same rights there as he has here. Enforcement is a separate issue. The US Constitution doesn't grant rights, it simply states that the government is required to respect them in exchange for receiving whatever appearance of legitimacy the Constitution can provide. The rights themselves exist independent of the Constitution, and predate the Constitution.
If rights only existed to the extent they could be enforced then it would be impossible to violate anyone's rights; the moment they were violated they would disappear. That would render the concept meaningless.
Anyway, we are speaking of U.S. citizens and agents of the U.S. government. Regardless of what may occur in other countries, they must adhere to U.S. law in every respect to maintain their legal status. The U.S. government obviously cannot authorize them to act contrary to U.S. law, and if they do so on their own they can be held accountable for it within the victim's jurisdiction.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat