A well-known and respected computer-security researcher was detained for several hours Wednesday night by border agents who searched his laptop and cellphones before returning them to him.

The researcher, who goes by the hacker handle Moxie Marlinspike, was met by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the door of his plane when he arrived at JFK airport on a Jet Blue flight from the Dominican Republic.

The border search comes on the heels of two similar incidents targeting other white hat hackers.

Marlinspike first began experiencing increased scrutiny about two months ago during domestic flights...

He found he was unable to print out a boarding pass either from his computer or from airline kiosks at airports. And when he approached ticket agents, they were blocked from producing a boarding pass for him without first calling a Secure Flight number at the Department of Homeland Security. Secure Flight is a program that requires airlines to submit passenger names and birthdates to DHS in advance of a flight, to be checked against watchlists. Marlinspike said ticket agents told him he was on a federal watchlist.

The harassment took a more ominous tone last Saturday, when Marlinspike was on his way home to the San Francisco Bay Area from Abu Dhabi, where he’d given a presentation at the Black Hat security conference. He was snoozing on an airport chair during an extended layover at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, when he was awakened.

“Some dude shows up with a picture of me on his cellphone,” Marlinspike said. “He’s going around looking at everyone and finally he finds me asleep with drool coming down my chin and he wakes me up.”

The agent said he was from the U.S. Consulate and told Marlinspike he’d have to answer a number of important questions.

This case basically confirms all of the worst case scenarios that civil libertarians have raised regarding post 9/11 security measures.

It appears that Moxie was placed on a secure flight watchlist. Whatever they want with Moxie, it obviously has nothing to do with terrorism or threats to aviation security. Therefore, clearly the secure flight watchlists are being used as a general purpose dragnet for monitoring the travel citizens suspected of any wrongdoing.

Furthermore, the level of suspicion required before one is subjected to this kind of monitoring is obviously very low. They obviously do not have enough evidence regarding whatever it is that they suspect Moxie of to establish probable cause and obtain a legal warrant to search his belongings. They therefore took advantage of the border search loophole in the 4th Amendment to perform a warrantless search. It seems unlikely that this border search has some legitimate connection with border security or smuggling. Its merely an opportunistic abuse of the 4th amendment loophole.