Going to the US? Don't Bring Your Laptop

…or anything electronic, for that matter. America has gotten so paranoid that it has unleashed yet another wave of anti-terror measures.

Reports this week have disclosed the Department of Homeland Security’s new policy which gives Federal agents free reign to take your electronic devices and hold them for as long as they like. Their basis: several searches of seemingly suspicious people which turned up “violent Jihadist materials” and images containing child pornography. These discoveries have been the foundation for such legislation, grounded upon the the baseless idea that most “contraband” material enter their territory unchecked inside electronic devices such as these.

Certainly, after the shock that was 9-11, the United States is expected, entitled
even to implement security measures in order to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. But we cannot correct one wrong with another. Under the new powers granted to federal agents securing ports of entry (by land, sea, or air) are so broad that they do not even need grounds to suspect wrongdoing. In fact, the law doesn’t establish any criteria which informs travellers whose computer can be searched. All that a federal agent needs in order to search your laptop (or IPOD, or hard drive, or thumb drive, or digital camera, or mobile phone, or book, or pamphlet, or diary, or anything capable of storing information in digital or analog form – or anything else on you for that matter) is that he has “some level of suspicion” in his mind that you may or may not be breaking the law. This is discrimination of the highest level and an assault on our universal rights as humans to life, liberty, and property. Certainly, with legislation such as this, travelers who wish to enter the United States do so with the fear of knowing that how they look and carry themselves may very well lead to an invasion of their privacy, and this fear acts as a censor which prevents them from expressing themselves and from documenting such expression by storing them in these electronic gadgets which were created exactly for that purpose. It is today’s equivalent of the “chilling effect” which we were so guarded in preventing.

To try to alleviate the public outcry against this egregious piece of policy, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that travelers are only subject to a secondary, more thorough level of investigation when a level of suspicion exists. But this statement does little to palliate. Without clear guidelines as to who may be subject to search, and what behavior is to be deemed “suspicious”, the matter is left entirely up to the federal agents’ discretion. This is illegal and there is no justification for it.

To add to that “chilling effect” already looming inside your head, just this April, the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco affirmed the government’s power to conduct searches of an international traveler’s laptop even though there was neither proof nor suspicion of wrongdoing.

Those who desire to be irked and frustrated may view the policy here:
http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissability/search—authori ty.ctt/search—authority.pdf.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702991.html

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5918770.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1040812/Airport-threat-laptop-U-S-gets-power-seize-iPods-mobiles-new-anti-terror-measure.html