[A]dding a heightened [suspicion-based] threshold requirement could be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefit. First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.

Moreover, requiring reasonable suspicion to conduct a search of electronic devices would focus limited law enforcement resources where they can be most effective. Suspicionless searches are not well-suited to identifying and locating contraband or illegal material, as the CBP's own data show. In 2009, for example, only about 5% of the electronic devices searched at the border were seized as a result of the search. Put differently, in the vast majority of instances involving border searches of electronic devices, the traveler has had to needlessly withstand a significant intrusion into his or her privacy for no legitimate law enforcement purpose.

The laptop border searches in the ICE and CBP policies do not violate travelers' First Amendment rights as defined by the courts.

Even more problematic is the government's claim that the "hard-to-articulate" hunch of a border agent is enough for the government to scrounge around through our personal photos, medical and financial records, email, and whatever other sensitive information may be stored on our laptops and phones... As the Supreme Court explained in Terry v. Ohio, if law enforcement agents are allowed to intrude upon people's rights "based on nothing more substantial than inarticulate hunches," then "the protections of the Fourth Amendment would evaporate, and the people would be ‘secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects,' only in the discretion of the [government]."

In a settlement reached with human rights activist David House, the government has agreed to destroy all data it obtained from his laptop and other electronics when he entered the U.S. after a vacation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Massachusetts announced today. House, who was then working with the Bradley Manning Support Network, an organization created to raise funds for the legal defense of the soldier who has admitted to leaking material to WikiLeaks, charged in a lawsuit that the seizure violated his Fourth Amendment rights by subjecting him to unreasonable search and seizure, and violated his First Amendment right to freedom of association.

Under the terms of the settlement, the government agreed to destroy all remaining data copied from House’s devices. The government will also hand over numerous documents, including reports describing Army CID’s inspection of House’s data as well as the DHS “Lookout” telling agents to stop House as he entered the country. The government further agreed to release reports on DHS agents’ questioning of House, which included inquiries about whether he knew anything about Manning giving classified information to WikiLeaks.

My place of employment puts a massive emphasis on health and safety in the workplace, a policy I am 100% in support of. Safety is an incredibly important issue, and I applaud Toshiba for taking it into consideration, but I think they are a little misguided. I have personally never been injured or visibly endangered by working on any kind of computer system, much less a consumer notebook computer. I have also never heard of anybody else being injured by working on one. While I do understand the drive behind any concern for safety, the reality is that there appears to be no risk to the well-being of myself or any of my readers by providing repair manuals free to download, and so I do not understand Toshiba’s cause for concern here.

It is worth noting that Dell, HP and Lenovo provide service manuals for all of their laptop computers for download, free of charge or registration or membership of any kind, on their various support websites, which would indicate that none of these companies share Toshiba’s concern in this regard. I would not seriously take this to mean that Toshiba laptops are inherently more dangerous to service than laptops of other brands, thus causing them to discourage unqualified persons from doing so, but drawing on my own knowledge and experience I cannot see what risk they are attempting to mitigate here.

There is no basis for the Court to conclude that searches of laptops or other electronic devices at the border should be subjected to a different standard than that for other closed containers. Nor is there a basis for the Court to conclude that Plaintiff’s First Amendment rights were violated by the routine search and detention of his devices at the border.

• You mostly store everything on your laptop. So, unlike a suitcase that you're bringing with you, it's the opposite. You might specifically choose what to exclude, but you don't really choose what to include. With a suitcase, you specifically choose what to include.
• The reason you bring the contents on your laptop over the border is because you're bringing your laptop over the border. If you wanted the content of your laptop to go over the border you'd just send it using the internet. There are no "border guards" on the internet itself, so content flows mostly freely across international boundaries. Thus if anyone wants to get certain content into a country via the internet, they're not doing it by entering that country through border control.

Moreover, it is purely conjecture that the other members of the putative class will be subjected to remote access of personal information.

Yikes! Privacy class actions seem out of control to me, but I'll admit even I was surprised by this result. I'm equally surprised that the Aaron's-affiliated defendants did not all just stipulate to suspending use of the software until things were sorted out. (Aarons, Inc. did, but its franchisee Aspen Way did not. In fact, Aspen Way did not participate in the hearing, which makes the denial of injunctive relief all the more perplexing.) Setting aside whether the court was correct in its view of the merits of the case, the court takes an unduly restrictive view of the facts when it states that no "interception" of an electronic communication occurred because there was no evidence that Mr. Byrd was online or communicating with someone else when the image in question was captured. Surely, given the ex-employee's testimony as to what type of information was viewed through use of the software, it's fair to presume that the Aspen Way employees are not sitting around making sure that the capture only occurred while the computer user was offline or not communicating with another person.

• You mostly store everything on your laptop. So, unlike a suitcase that you're bringing with you, it's the opposite. You might specifically choose what to exclude, but you don't really choose what to include.
• The reason you bring the contents on your laptop over the border is because you're bringing your laptop over the border. If you wanted the content of your laptop to go over the border you'd just send it using the internet. There are no "border guards" on the internet itself, so content flows mostly freely across international boundaries. Thus if anyone wants to get certain content into a country via the internet, they're not doing it by entering that country through border control.

Historically, the scope of what was covered by the border search exception was fairly limited, since the exception is confined to the items a traveler carries across the border. As a practical matter, most private documents, letters, photographs, and other personal effects would remain in an individual’s home, safeguarded by full Fourth Amendment protections and the warrant requirement. With today’s technology, however, people can and do travel with vast quantities of private, personal information stored on their laptops and other electronic devices. Unlike at any time in the past, individuals who travel internationally, by virtue of legitimately choosing to carry electronic devices, are unknowingly subjecting volumes of personal information to involuntary and suspicionless search and review by federal law enforcement authorities. This problem is compounded by the fact that many electronic devices are used to carry both personal and business-related information. The continual evolution in how people use electronic devices in their everyday lives creates growing tension between the Fourth Amendment guarantees and what historically has been viewed as a narrow exception to the requirements for probable cause and a warrant.

Your Honor, the CD is in my laptop. If they want to watch it, I don't have any problem with the CD they can't obviously watch anything without the CD. My concern if I take it out, shut down the computer I am not here there is no one to gather it back up. So I would suggest we leave it here in the event they want to look at it they come back and look at it.

1. You mostly store everything on your laptop. So, unlike a suitcase that you're bringing with you, it's the opposite. You might specifically choose what to exclude, but you don't really choose what to include.
2. The reason you bring the contents on your laptop over the border is because you're bringing your laptop over the border. If you wanted the content of your laptop to go over the border you'd just send it using the internet. There are no "border guards" on the internet itself, so content flows mostly freely across international boundaries. Thus if anyone wants to get certain content into a country via the internet, they're not doing it by entering that country through border control.

"Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States,"

Clearly he's not talking about attention itself, but diverting attention using a computer. Cooper's clear assumption is that work is "bad" and that leisure is "good," that technology (a laptop) is "bad" and non-technology (a book) is "good."

Cooper also makes a host of other assumptions. For starters, he assumes that you're disconnected from your own family all year, and need to "commune again with your family, connect with your children." So that's his advice? Become alienated from your own family, then "commune" with them for only two weeks a year? Why does he assume alienation in the first place?

Cooper assumes that you're some nine-to-fiver who doesn't do creative work. As an opinion columnist, good ideas can strike me anytime, anywhere. That's true for a lot of different kinds of people. For many, a laptop is merely a writing tool, and a source of information and inspiration.

An increasing number of digital nomads are traveling without taking time off. The laptop *enables* travel and time away with family rather than creating a problem while traveling.

It appears to me that Cooper is making a lot of assumptions, and using his credentials to give credibility to his anti-technology bias.

"We don't believe the security or privacy of these would-be members will be compromised in any way."