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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!”
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.
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"
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.