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.
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