Train in Vain

On Monday, I took the Amtrak from LA to San Diego for a court appearance. One would think that a train ride through Southern California would be scenic, but it's not until you get to the southern reaches of Orange County that the train tracks start running past the type of beach-and-surf panoramas for which SoCal is famous. Headed south from Los Angeles, the train runs through gritty, grafitti-filled industrial areas (the "wrong side of the tracks" you keep hearing about); then zips past one trailer park after another.

One choice bit of scenery: just north of San Diego, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey train passed by, complete with animal cages. Visions of "Dumbo" and "The Greatest Show on Earth" filled my head.

Laptop Liability

Today's Los Angeles Times has a startling story for folks who travel overseas with laptops: U.S. Customs officials believe they have the right to boot up your laptop, look at every file and photo thereon, seize it, and, yes, prosecute you based on the laptop's contents -- all without warrant, probable cause, or even the reasonable suspicion required for a pat-down search on the street.

According to the article, this erosion of 4th amendment protection is currently being questioned in the central district court here in L.A.

It's true that the 4th amendment search and seizure restrictions have been interpreted to grant border officers more leeway in searches, because of the interest in preventing smuggling (of both inanimate objects and humans) and cross-border contamination. But as the article points out, this is an intrusiveness that goes beyond simply looking inside luggage -- particularly since business laptops can contain proprietary information. And in a balancing test, the importance of searching laptops to interdict contraband is questionable; with the Internet, it's probably easier to move information via e-mail and ftp sites than to load it onto laptops. We'll see how this turns out.