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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.
PortableApps.com = move your digital life onto removable media, able to run on any PC.
microSDHC = 1-16GB storage on a sub-fingernail-sized removable media.
Unless they're gonna go thru all the lint in everyone's pockets, they can have the notebook.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Centralized power of ANY kind, whether it is in a corporation or government, is dangerous to individual liberty.
In the absence of some outside restraining force, how do you avoid the inevitable natural concentration of power when everything is left to its own forces? Neither governments nor corporations appeared out of thin air; similar institutions have inevitably been created by people of civilizations that are very different otherwise. This seems to imply that the very nature of human society leads to them.
Government, in that sense, is an attempt to curb the threat of centralized power by trying to have a single entity, which is at least nominally controllable, and can all other such entities - corporations - in check. It is itself effectively a private corporation (for citizens only) with non-transferable shares. Without its regulative effects, you instead have a bunch of completely uncontrollable, powerful entities that fight each other by all means available. Worst-case scenario is that they form a cartel, and then you have a corporatist dictatorship. So what do you propose?
Why must decisions always be placed in someone else's hands? Why can't I make my OWN decisions of what I want to buy, or wish to work, or desire to live.
The other side of a coin is having more than one choice. Elections were commonplace in all communist states, and they're still held in e.g. North Korea. It's just that the list of candidates is such that choice is meaningless. But the same effect can also be achieved economically, through monopolistic collusion - when your choice is not "buy X or Y", but "buy X or don't buy at all" - and for some categories of goods (e.g. food), the latter simply isn't an option. And a similar scheme with an even greater potential for abuse is possible on the job market...