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Appeals Court Affirms Warrantless Computer Searches
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"Laptop computers and other digital devices carried into the US may be seized from travelers without a warrant and sent to a secondary site for forensic inspection, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled last week. The ruling is the second in less than a year that allows the US government to conduct warrantless, offsite searches of digital devices seized at the country's borders. A federal court in Michigan last May issued a similar ruling in a case challenging the constitutionality of the warrantless seizure of a computer at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Several other courts, including the Ninth Circuit itself, have ruled that warrantless, suspicion-less searches of laptops and other digital devices can take place at US border locations."
"Suspicion-less searches" comes in handy
"We had your laptop searched for no reason, we never suspected you of doing anything wrong..."
This way, nobody could ever complain of discriminatory treatment based on race, nationality, religion, etc.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You would be surprised how many non-slashdotters do not think of it. Do not assume that because it is obvious to you it is to everybody.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but before we all start quoting 1984...hasn't this kind of search always been legal in the United States?
"That searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border, should, by now, require no extended demonstration...Authorized by the First Congress (1789)"
http://law.onecle.com/constitution/amendment-04/18-border-searches.html
I travel internationally frequently on business as do many of my friends and colleges. Of the over 50 total trips I'm aware of my circle of acquaintances taking, never once has anyone been stopped for a warrantless computer search. While there are certainly personal liberty concerns related to presumption of guilt/innocence or guilt by association, the practical reality is that unless you're a friend of Julian Assange, you're not likely to ever encounter this.
And even this friend of Julian Assange was not forced to divulge his encryption key and had his laptop returned. (http://randomchaos.us/hacking/another-hacker%E2%80%99s-laptop-cell-phones-searched-at-border.html)
So if you are concerned about the potential of these searches, encryption may be a more practical way to feel safer.
It's not always that easy. The Brazilian authorities enlisted the aid of the FBI in cracking the encryption on the hard drive of banker Daniel Dantas, who was suspected of money laundering and attempting to bribe law enforcement. Despite five months of work by Brazil and about twelve months by the FBI, they couldn't get into his drives protected by TrueCrypt using AES-256 and good, long passwords. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison, but only on the bribery charges. The money laundering case couldn't proceed without the data on the drives.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If you read TFA, the guy was a REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER in California according to TSA records.
WHOAH, how is that fact even relevant? Even convicted criminals have civil rights. Just because you find this guy personally repugnant doesn't mean that he isn't a person under the constitution.
Replace 'sex offender' with the word 'jew' and try to repeat your statement without sounding like a Nazi. Go on, I dare you.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
a) It's plausibly deniable due to how a Truecrypt volume masks itself
I just wanted to point out that, while they cannot detect if a Truecrypt hidden partition exists on the system partition, they can tell that the system partition is encrypted with Truecrypt.
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability
also note that, for system encryption, the first drive track contains the (unencrypted) TrueCrypt Boot Loader, which can be easily identified as such
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
So border searches have always been legal. The Supreme Court has ruled before that you've no expectation of privacy at the border, and that nations have the right to secure their borders by searches. This has been pretty uncontroversial for a long time. However the thing is these searches were for security and for preventing smuggling and the like. So what they could do (and did) was check your bags, your car, etc for contraband and/or dangerous items. Then you were on your way.
Well laptops are different and make two new problems:
1) They are actually seizing them, with no evidence of anything wrong. In past searches they could look through your stuff for any reason or no reason at all, but if everything was fine, you went on your way. With laptops they claim the right to seize them, and hold them for an indefinite period. That is real different than a search. Imagine if at the border they took your bag and said "We are going to take this off to check. We won't tell you who gets to look at it or when you can have it back. We don't have any evidence there is anything wrong, but we are taking it anyhow."
2) Computers are like journals, or other personal writings in many ways and those were not searched/copied at the border. So while they could go through your bag and look for drugs, they couldn't take your personal papers, copy them, and read through them. They weren't allowed to pry in to any and every detail of your life, just check for security reasons or smuggling reasons. You can see how a laptop, particularly one that has e-mail stored on it, would be very similar to personal papers.
That's the issue here. Nobody is saying they can't have a look at the laptop to make sure it isn't a bomb, or hasn't had its innards removed and replaced with drugs. What they are saying is they shouldn't be able to take the laptop, hold on to it for an indefinite time, copy the data, hand it out to other federal agencies and not tell you who, and so on.
This is the one to ram the point home!
http://www.aclu.org/constitution-free-zone-map
live in the orange? then this story applies to you!
they can search whatever the hell they want if you live there.
no warrant
no recourse
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I don't think anything short of a Constitutional amendment is going to protect our property against unreasonable searches and seizures
Why would a new amendment make any more difference than the ones we already have?