http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/investing/bal-bz.ml.laptops29jun29,0,3324276.story
Agents can randomly seize travelers' laptops or PDAs
By Jim Puzzanghera
June 29, 2008
WASHINGTON - Bill Hogan was returning home from Germany in February when a customs agent at Washington Dulles International Airport pulled him aside. He could re-enter the country, she told him. But his laptop could not.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents said he had been chosen for "random inspection of electronic media," and kept his computer for about two weeks, recalled Hogan, 55, a freelance journalist from Falls Church, Va.
Though it was a spare computer that had little important information, Hogan felt violated.
"It's not an inspection. It's a seizure," he said. "What do they do with it? I assume they just copy everything."
For several years, U.S. officials have been searching and seizing laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and other electronic devices at the border with few publicly released details. Complaints from travelers and privacy advocates have spurred some lawmakers to question the U.S. Customs and Border Protection policy.
As people store more and more information electronically, the debate hinges on whether searching a laptop is the equivalent of looking in your luggage, or more like a strip search.
"Customs agents must have the ability to conduct even highly intrusive searches when there is reason to suspect criminal or terrorist activity, but suspicion-less searches of Americans' laptops and similar devices go too far," said Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who chairs a subcommittee that examined the searches at a hearing Wednesday. "Congress should not allow this gross violation of privacy."
Authorities need a search warrant to get at a computer in a person's home, and reasonable suspicion of illegal activity to search a laptop in other places. But the rules change at border crossings. Courts have ruled that there's no need for warrants or suspicions when a person is seeking to enter the country - agents can search belongings, including computer gear, for any reason.
The latest was the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in April that agents acted properly in turning over information used to charge a traveler with possession of child pornography. His laptop had been searched in 2005 at Los Angeles International Airport.
Any routine search is considered "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment, legal scholars agree. But Feingold worries that the law has not kept up with technology.
"People keep their lives on these devices: diaries, personal mail, financial records, family photos. ... The government should not be able to read this information," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In February, the group and the Asian Law Caucus sued authorities for more information about the program.
The issue is of particular concern for businesses, which risk the loss of proprietary data when executives travel abroad, said Susan K. Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. After the California ruling, the group warned its members to limit the business and personal information they carry on laptops taken out of the country.
Of 100 people who responded to a survey the association did in February, seven said they had been subject to the seizure of a laptop or other electronic device.
Jayson P. Ahern, deputy commissioner of customs and border protection, said in written testimony to the subcommittee that the agency would "protect information that may be discovered during the examination process, as well as private information of a personal nature that is not in violation of any law." The agency conducts "a regular review and purging of information that is no longer relevant," Ahern wrote.
Feingold said the testimony gave "little meaningful detail" about the program. He is considering legislation to prohibit such routine searches of electronic devices without reasonable suspicion.
But Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said U.S. officials have to balance individual rights with protecting the nation.
"Terrorists take advantage of this kind of technology," he said.
Hogan, the freelance journalist, said there was no reason for customs agents to think he was a terrorist. He advised people to take precautions with their laptops when they leave the country.
"I certainly would never take it again," he said.
Jim Puzzanghera writes for the Los Angeles Times.
Some thoughts by the great working class writer Howard Fast as the dark, gloomy days of McCarthyism were beginning to take hold in our country...
From the "Daily Worker"
NO MAN CAN BE SILENT
by Howard Fast
In a box in a cupboard my father kept three somewhat old, somewhat ragged American flags. We were poor people with few possessions, but wherever we went the flags went too. One of them, the best of the three, came out for holidays. It didn't matter what the importance of the holiday was; whether it was Decoration Day or Columbus Day out came the best of the three flags to be draped over a window sill or tied onto a pole.
I asked him once why he kept the old flags and he said that they were entitled to it, he thought; you didn't throw a flag away; it was more than old clothes, more than a shirt whose destiny was to become a dustrag.
My brother still has the flags. My father, many years since, was laid away in the good earth of this country which he loved so well, so deeply, so unreservedly, so simply and so lastingly. His love for America was not the cheap thing that Rotarians call patriotism; it was the attachment of the child to the mother; it had some of what the farmer feels when he picks up the black earth and crumbles it in his fingers; it was respect born out of understanding, and though I value many things he gave me, I think I value that most.
People have asked, me, too often perhaps, why I write the kind of books I do; they ask me where my ideas come from, and if I were to say that my writing and all in it comes from the land that bore me and nurtured me, it would be pat and evident, but the truth nevertheless. It is a hard thing to say; even as, in this day and this situation, we are being robbed of our ideals and our principles, so are we being robbed of the ability to say a basic thing simply and straightforwardly and unashamedly.
Whatever I am, America made me; I say that proudly and will, I trust, continue to say it until I die. For a decade and a half I have tried, in every way I know, to understand my country and to serve her. I have never put pen to paper except with that purpose in mind, and sometimes I have succeeded poorly and sometimes well. I think I can say that. This is no time for modesty, but a time for courage and greatness. Many men will speak out, and it is fitting that they should speak out with all their hearts and all their strength.
I have lived through the history of this land, roamed through it, and had the good fortune to understand some very great men who are dead these many years. Also I came to know some of the living, so that I can tell my children some day how I took the hand of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and talked with him and ate with him--and the hands of others too.
And this I know: that never in all its time and history was our land in such peril, such terrible, mortal peril! What a craven, miserable creature a man must be to remain silent at a time like this! What a poor thing it is to sell one's birthright for a mess of pottage and less!
Liberty, democracy, human rights--these are words we wrote across the sky in starry letters. It was our tiny revolutionary army that taught the world an eternal lesson in freedom. It was in our land that the dignity of the individual was exalted. It was our Bill of Rights that sanctified the security of the citizen, and it was our Civil War that taught the world a lesson in the price that freedom requires.
And what do we see now? A congressman whose very name has become a shameful and international badge of iniquity and hatred proposes in Congress a bill which at one stroke would wipe out all our rights, all our hard-won freedom. And there are men who stay silent.
A member of the Cabinet calls for the suppression of a political party which has worked tirelessly and unceasingly for civil rights and for the cause of labor and the people. And some men say: after all it is not my party, and I will stay silent; perhaps they will forget me and leave me alone.
A President of this land calls for a world empire, for forcible intervention in any land which strikes our fancy, and implicit in his words is the threat of a war which could wipe out a hundred million or five hundred million human souls, a war against a former ally of ours--and the Congress listens to him and applauds him.
What have we come to? Did Germany teach us no lessons? Do we still believe the insane illusion that by silence men can make their peace with fascism? Are we to become so like insects, so like beetles and. roaches that we believe in the security of the crevices into which frightened men crawl?
This is no time for complicated preachments. The simple fact is this: that all we believe in and all we value is at stake.
Howard Fast--- America's outstanding working class writer and Communist...
...dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee... is this where our country is headed once again?
Alan L. Maki
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Warroad, Minnesota 56763
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E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net
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Thoughts From Podunk
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