American Citizen Detained At Border Due To Drawing Of An SUV

from the think-how-much-worse-it-could-be dept

If you want to understand why we're so troubled by the ACTA treaty that many nations are working on in secret, we just need to look at a story highlighted recently at Boing Boing about an American woman who was detained for a while at the US-Canadian border because she had a drawing of an SUV. The customs officials accused her of being an industrial spy and copyright infringer. In actuality, she's a professor and artist, who was doing an art project involving an SUV.

Of course, what the ACTA treaty would do is give customs officials and border guards even broader authority and a mandate to try to "stop copyright infringement" at the border. It would open people up to inspections for all sorts of things, from computers to personal devices -- and if you thought a random drawing could get someone detained before, just imagine what happens after ACTA is put in place.

The most ridiculous part, of course, is that this really has nothing to do with what the border patrol should be focused on: which is keeping dangerous people or things out of the country. Copyright infringement is meaningless at the border. Infringement happens across borders all the time online. Stopping it physically at the border makes no sense. If someone wants infringement to cross the border, they'll just send it online, rather than carry it on their body. And, until customs and border patrol starts scanning every IP packet at the border, it's a total waste of time and effort to ask border patrol officials to search for copyright infringement. It takes their energy and attention away from the real task at hand of keeping dangerous people out.

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Bills Introduced To Protect Laptops At Border Searches

from the restoring-the-4th-amendment dept

As was widely expected following earlier statements from politicians such as Russ Feingold, legislation has now been introduced that would curb Homeland Security's ability to randomly search laptops at the border, instead, requiring them to have a "reasonable suspicion" of illegal activity before they can search or copy a hard drive. This would be a huge step forward in terms of reasonable levels of privacy at the border. While defenders of the random search program claim that it's necessary, they give little proof. You can tell because their arguments could equally be applied to searching a random person on the street as well, as they just give vague platitudes about protecting the country from harm. Yet our country has privacy rights and probable cause for a very good reason. It's nice to actually see some politicians standing up to make sure that Homeland Security live up to those ideals.

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DHS: Laptop Border Searches Are Bad... Except When We Do It

from the that-may-change-soon dept

The Department of Homeland Security has been actively (though with really weak arguments) defending its policy of searching laptops at the border, even without probable cause. Yet, at the very same time that it was staunchly defending the policy and refusing to testify in front of Congress over it, it was also issuing a report warning international travelers not to take laptops, since foreign governments often search them. You see, when foreign governments do it, it's evil espionage. But when we do it, it's for our own security:

"Foreign governments routinely target the computers and other electronic devices and media carried by U.S. corporate and government personnel traveling abroad to gather economic, military, and political information."

Either way, it looks like DHS's own freedom to search laptops without probable cause may soon get curtailed. The Senate has been making noise for a while about introducing a bill to reign in the laptop searches, and Rep. Loretta Sanchez introduced some legislation in the House last week that would establish clear rules, compared to the anything goes policy currently in existence. Kind of sad that we need special legislation to make it clear that the 4th Amendment should apply at the border, but such is life these days.

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EFF Asks Congress To Look Into Border Searches Of Laptops

from the some-rules-would-be-nice dept

Last month yet another court ruled that border patrol guards could search the data on mobile phones and laptops without any probable cause. This was troubling for a variety of reasons, since it basically gives them access to all sorts of things that one would have a normal expectation of privacy over. It's quite different than, say, a stack of papers you have brought with you while traveling overseas. In those cases, you made the proactive decision to take those files with you. Yet, since your computer stores everything, you're exposing much more, and doing it without making the proactive decision to bring those files with you. It's also not clear how this applies to network drives. For example, I store some files on a network drive that appears as just another drive off of my laptop, even though it's not in the laptop itself. Can a customs agent start searching that drive as well? This raises some serious concerns, and the EFF is now demanding some Congressional oversight concerning how these laptop and mobile device searches take place, even suggesting that laws be put in place to prevent the abuse of power by customs agents.

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EFF Asks For Details On Border Laptop & Mobile Phone Searches

from the guidelines-please? dept

Last month, we wrote about how more courts have been saying that customs agents could search the content of your laptop or mobile phone upon entering the country. For many, that's a pretty scary thought, considering the amount of personal or confidential information that people often have on their laptops and phones. It's even scarier when customs agents make a copy of that data, as it's not clear what they actually do with it or if they ever delete it. In response, the EFF, along with the Asian Law Caucus, are filing a lawsuit to force the government to give details and guidelines that explain its policies on these searches and what's actually done with the data. It seems like a totally reasonable question -- but given our government's belief in secrecy over all else, expect to find out that this cannot be revealed for "national security" purposes.

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