Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Your hard drives, please!

Smarter people than I have written about CBP new far reaching policy (PDF) on laptop searches, both entering and exiting the United States.

From Declan McCullagh, comes this discussion of “extended borders” and the impact of copyright and trademark law. And, from Peter Swire:

The government seems to believe that, if they can open a suitcase at the border, then they can open a laptop as well. This simplistic legal theory ignores the massive factual differences between a quick glance into a suitcase and the ability to copy a lifetime of files from someone’s laptop, and then examine those files at the government’s leisure.

[...]

This issue has come into sharp focus since the April decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Arnold. That panel clearly ruled that CPB can seize a laptop computer at the border, and examine its contents, without any reasonable suspicion of unlawful activity. Affidavits in that case and other credible reports show that agents at the border are going further—they are requiring travelers to reveal their passwords or encryption keys so that government agents can examine the full content of the laptop or other computing device.

This is the effective equivalent of key escrow, which is a damned stupid idea. Given the near total lack of accountability, this is an epically stupid idea that only a high-ranking bureaucrat that struggles with email could possible have originiated. That, or someone was mining George Orwell again.

I can promise you that more and more people will make sure that nothing crosses the border that is discernible by the jack-booted thugs.