Arnold has failed to distinguish how the search of his laptop and its electronic contents is logically any different from the suspicionless border searches of travelers’ luggage that the Supreme Court and we have allowed.

Its clear that there is a difference. The court may decide that the difference is not constitutionally significant, but it is not helpful for the court to pretend that no difference exists. This is a sort of ignorance that allows the court to reach a comfortable decision without addressing the substantive question...

My rant on today's decision.

Never before has the court system faced a situation wherein people are regularly transporting all of their worldly information with them every time they cross a border. That is not just like luggage. It is a fundamentally different situation, and the court ought to address it specifically, and explain why searches of all of this information are presumptively reasonable.

The Washington Post has already reported on corporations that have instructed their employees in response to this policy to maintain a special "travel laptop" which is not their normal computer, and is just like luggage, in that the information copied on to it prior to travel is only the information required on that trip. It seems perverse that in a "free society" people would be forced to go to the trouble of keeping a special laptop on which they place carefully selected scraps of information for no other reason than so that they can bring it through a legal black hole in which they are subject to nearly unconstrained searches.

The 4th amendment is intended to avoid creating situations wherein normal people have to act like criminals out of fear that a government fishing expedition will root through their property and all of their correspondence and find some reason to hang them. That is precisely what this policy does, and that is precisely why I think that these searches are not reasonable. The court system might disagree, but it is not responsible for them to do so without giving the matter due examination.

Never before has the court system faced a situation wherein people are regularly transporting all of their worldly information with them every time they cross a border. That is not just like luggage. It is a fundamentally different situation, and the court ought to address it specifically, and explain why searches of all of this information are presumptively reasonable.

The Washington Post has already reported on corporations that have instructed their employees in response to this policy to maintain a special "travel laptop" which is not their normal computer, and is just like luggage, in that the information copied on to it prior to travel is only the information required on that trip. It seems perverse that in a "free society" people would be forced to go to the trouble of keeping a special laptop on which they place carefully selected scraps of information for no other reason than so that they can bring it through a legal black hole in which they are subject to nearly unconstrained searches.

The 4th amendment is intended to avoid creating situations wherein normal people have to act like criminals out of fear that a government fishing expedition will root through their property and all of their correspondence and find some reason to hang them. That is precisely what this policy does, and that is precisely why I think that these searches are not reasonable. The court system might disagree, but it is not responsible for them to do so without giving the matter due examination.

Note the "The Washington Post has already reported on corporations that have instructed their employees in response to this policy to maintain a special "travel laptop" which is not their normal computer, and is just like luggage, in that the information copied on to it prior to travel is only the information required on that trip."

I can't wait to see the business community weigh in on these added costs to keep their corporate data private, away from the prying eyes of the federal government.