Bob Barr wrote a nice essay on border searches of laptops that does a good job picking at the argument that nothing has changed:
In earlier times, the government also relied much more heavily than nowadays on customs duties for its revenues, and the number of offenses for which federal agents were responsible was far fewer. As such, it was difficult to fault customs agents for conducting brief physical inspections of travelers’ luggage.
Unlike customs agents in the post-Revolutionary War era, however, the jurisdiction today of federal law enforcement agents encompasses literally thousands of criminal and civil offenses...
The huge expansion of the universe of possible offenses for which an individual can be charged, coupled with the massive increase in the amount of information that can be stored on even the cheapest of modern electronic devices, has caused many privacy advocates and civil libertarians to question the propriety if not the constitutionality of this vast expansion of the government’s “border search” power. In the absence of legislation placing reasonable limits on this power, the 1,000 such searches just of laptops the government said it has conducted in the last year, will expand exponentially.
Their policy allows them to search every single laptop.
