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Judge: Warrantless Airport Seizure of Laptop 'Cannot Be Justified'
SonicSpike writes with news of a ruling in U.S. District Court that the seizure and search of a man's laptop without a warrant while he was in an airport during an international border crossing was not justified. According to Judge Amy Jackson's ruling (PDF), the defendant was already the subject of an investigation when officials used his international flight as a pretext for rifling through his laptop. The government argued that a laptop was simply a "container," and thus subject to warrantless searches to protect the homeland. But the judge said the search "was supported by so little suspicion of ongoing or imminent criminal activity, and was so invasive of Kim's privacy and so disconnected from not only the considerations underlying the breadth of the government's authority to search at the border, but also the border itself, that it was unreasonable."
She also noted that laptop searches may require more stringent legal support, since they are capable of holding much more private information than a box or duffel bag. And while a routine search involves a quick look through a container, this search was quite different: "[T]he agents created an identical image of Kim's entire computer hard drive and gave themselves unlimited time to search the tens of thousands of documents, images, and emails it contained, using an extensive list of search terms, and with the assistance of two forensic software programs that organized, expedited, and facilitated the task."
She also noted that laptop searches may require more stringent legal support, since they are capable of holding much more private information than a box or duffel bag. And while a routine search involves a quick look through a container, this search was quite different: "[T]he agents created an identical image of Kim's entire computer hard drive and gave themselves unlimited time to search the tens of thousands of documents, images, and emails it contained, using an extensive list of search terms, and with the assistance of two forensic software programs that organized, expedited, and facilitated the task."
I've never seen where lack of justification ever stopped the government.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What troubles me most is the mindset that allows this kind of bullshit to occur regularly- - and I can only assume it's because there is a now a concrete pattern of never prosecuting government officials for crimes like this.
The long-term message that comes from NOT prosecuting government torturers, mass surveillance-ers and directors who lie to congress is there will be no consequences, so there is no reason to stop. Is it Snowden who should be prosecuted, or every person who works at the NSA, knew what was happening and that it coudln't possibly be legal, and did NOT speak up?
PS- hi, nsa
He will have the IRS turn the guy's life upside down. Civil forfeiture and financial account freezes are the modern torture.
Erase your hard drive with a multi-pass secure wiping program before restoring the fresh image on it. Yeah yeah yeah it may not be perfect and theoretically some magical device might be able to pick up variations in temporal magnetic quantum flux in adjacent bits and recover data blah blah blah. But if they go to that level to recover your data, you were fucked anyways.
If they ask why it's such a fresh install, you just simply state that you access everything via VPN and you only travel with a fresh laptop in case it's lost, stolen, detained, confiscated, etc and you don't lose anything and everything on it while you're traveling.
If you want to arrive unmolested you might try not taking part in an ongoing criminal conspiracy.
Unfortunately, I pay taxes in the US, thereby providing material support to a terrorist organization.
Easy to say "just don't do it", not so easy to spend a few years in Club Fed for resisting the IRS' annual shake-down.
>> If the Special Agents involved had done their due diligence they could have easily obtained a warrant to seize the laptop rather than relying on the border search exception.
Well, if they could've, they would've. But it seems they didn't have substantial evidence to support a search warrant and they decided to get a sneak peek using border as an excuse. And yes, if it's not legal inside the US, then it's definitely without probable cause, at least legally speaking. Being involved in an investigation doesn't take much, you don't have to do anything besides being near or catching an eye of an investigator, and requirement for warrants is not baseless, it's to exclude the "hey, I don't like this guy, let's investigate him, search everything and then maybe we'll find something to accuse him of".
Bullshit.
TSA et al have done the exact same thing with the laptops of people who aren't suspected of any criminal activity. And even if they are suspected of criminal activity, they're still entitled to due process.
What you're saying is "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide".
Have we actually reached the point where people are willing to accept fascists bypassing the law to make their lives easier? Or bullshit searches defended by the notion that innocent people have nothing to fear?
Because what yo're saying is "a little fascism is OK if we think they're bad guys". Fuck that.
Then get a fucking warrant . Bypassing legal obligations because you think you can game the system and get the TSA to do it for you means you should lose your fucking job.
It's bloody well time law enforcement was actually penalized when they do crap like this. And parallel construction should be grounds for criminal perjury charges.
None of this "oh we had to lie to get a conviction and keep our sources secret". Because that's a crock of shit.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hoenstly, I feel the same way about it. But if its any consolation, I don't feel I pay taxes so much as they just take them. Hell, their "share" of my money gets allocated before I even get it....I have to ask for a portion of it back every year.
Yet all they ever want to ask me is which face I like, they never once asked me if stomping on liberty was ok, they never once asked me if I wanted to pay for their oil wars or their torture program. I would gladly pay taxes to put every fucking torturer in prison and keep them their till they die of natural causes, but, nobody wants to give me that opportunity.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Just a point of order, warrants are not required for searches and never have been. The vast majority of searches are conducted without warrants. For instance, the cops don't need a warrant to search somebody they're going to arrest. What's needed is that the search be "reasonable." So, either probable cause ("I smell weed!" rofl rofl rofl) or permission ("Hur, dur, of course you can look in my car occiffer!"). And a warrant is just a way of crossing the i's and dotting to the t's to demonstrate that you have established probable cause. So, don't think that just because a cop doesn't have a warrant he can't search you.
However, in this case, there is zero probable cause to search this guy's laptop. There is no way one can reasonably believe criminal activity is underway on his laptop, RIGHT NOW such that obtaining a warrant would be unnecessary.
There seems to have finally been some realization by judges that searches of electronic equipment are BIG FREAKING DEALS. Now that everybody has their life on their phone and computer, a look on your phone or in your laptop is a look inside your brain. I would rather have the cops look in my closet than on my phone. Now that computers have permeated society, I think judges and legislators are becoming less clueless, and we might finally see some progress on civil rights when it comes to electronics. The stuff we've been screaming about on /. for 15+ years is starting to come out of the mouths of judges.
Just sayin' it's a positive sign.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Similar problem with deniable encryption. It sounds great, but if the bad guys think you've fooled them, they'll just keep beating you with the $5 wrench even after you've broken and given them the real password.
Best idea is to simply avoid people who are legally allowed to beat you. Trolling them sounds like fun, but, well, the wrench...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Also, you'll need to avoid:
+ having a name remotely similar to someone who is part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy,
+ driving a vehicle the same model and color as someone who is part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy,
+ being mentioned in a communication by someone who is part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy, even via typo,
+ looking vaguely like someone who is part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy in the eyes of the half-blind TSA agent,
+ looking like a brown person
+ having a nice looking new computer that a TSA agent just plain feels like stealing.
All of those things are reasons that either we've seen articles posted here about illegal seizures being justified by, or that people I know myself got "grabbed off the street" for. (That would be the same model/color vehicle one. The 60 year old woman they grabbed was not allowed to contact anyone until she was released with an "oops, license plate was wrong, and we were looking for a 20 year old guy anyways" 12 hours of interrogation later.)
As long as you manage all of that, AND have nothing to hide, I suppose you're totally safe as can be! (At least until you're not.)
"You'll be harassed for it." is a bad symptom.
"If we can't use justice, we'll just use bullshit. We don't need to be 'right'." kind of demands to be contested on sheer principle. No, not everyone can afford to do so, but we can be aware.
Sure it is. As a country we're exceptionally stubborn. Exceptionally greedy. Exceptionally fat. Exceptionally arrogant. Exceptionally stupid. Exceptionally self-absorbed...
Why, what did you think was exceptional about the US these days?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.