Since the founding of our Republic, Congress has granted the Executive plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border, without probable cause or a warrant, in order to regulate the collection of duties and to prevent the introduction of contraband into this country.

In this case a standard of suspicion is set before border guards can detain someone for hours hoping their bowel movements might produce cocaine balloons. That standard is very low, but there is a standard. It cannot be done at random. The question is whether a search of a laptop's contents is "routine" or whether it is special. Note Brennan and Marshall's dissent, which is much more along the lines of my thinking then the majority.

US v. Montoya De Hernadez

That searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border, should, by now, require no extended demonstration.

Acidus mentioned that he wanted to read some of the precidents for random border searches.

US v. Ramsey

...that when this country was first founded international travel was expensive and rare. It mostly occured for the purposes of commercial shipping. Neighboring Canada and Mexico were actively hostile countries. The things searched for at these borders were likely limited in scope to commercial tarrif enforcement and possibly espionage. A great deal has changed in 200 years. Neighboring Canada and Mexico are no longer enemies. The cost and time involved in international travel has plummeted, and the amount of travel has exploded. Furthermore, the things searched for have expanded far beyond enforcement of commerical tarrifs to include personal contraban of various sorts, personal import limits, intellectual property crimes, and anti-terrorism. Essentially, the number of people travelling has gone way up and the intrusivness of searches has gone way up, and so the psychological impact of these searches has increased. What before might have seemed reasonable now feels very much like the actions of a police state, and may no longer be Constitutionally sound (in fact if not as a matter of law).

I flew into SFO (San Francisco) from Asia in May 2006.

I went straight to the customs agent as I had no luggage.

The agent asked to go through my only bag.

I gave him my bag.

The agent took out my laptop and turned it on.

He then asked for my password

He said that he wanted to verify that I had no illegal content on my hard drive...

While operating my laptop he said that we was tasked with preventing illegal pornographic material from entering the United States

Travis Kalanick
Red Swoosh, Inc.
Founder, CEO

These things usually make me angry. This just makes me sad. The difference is that I don't think there is anything that can be done to stop this. I think this means we've already lost. I beleive that the fact that these searches occur at an international border does not make them per say reasonable. The world is much smaller then it used to be. These searches have nothing to do with protecting national security. They are a dragnet setup in a Constitutional loophole that millions pass through every day. Furthermore, the contents of one's laptop are the closest physical thing to the contents of one's head. And the police are rifling through them at random. And there isn't a damn thing that can be done about it. We learned these lessons of history the hard way, and now we've forgotten and we're going to learn them the hard way again, and there is no stopping it. Communism may have lost, but Authoritarianism has won.

Yes they ARE doing random laptop searches at borders

Catonic posted about this but he linked the main BarCamp site, which I had already memed. If they find a location this could be fairly cool, but so far the talk list is a little blah. Perhaps we should have a hacker contingent show up and spice things up a bit. It might also be cool in incorporate some amateur rocketry people, given the location.

BarCamp / BarCampBirmingham

Since the UN never deploys observers to an active war zone, logic would suggest these unarmed men should have been pulled out the moment hostilities went beyond minor violations of the ceasefire they were monitoring... For the immediate-ceasefire crowd, the deaths of the UN military observers held the potential to give them a powerful moral argument against Israel's offensive -- beyond the one they were already citing daily: the mounting toll of civilian casualties.

UN post should have been cleared

This is by far the most elaborate website under construction graphic set that I have ever seen. Check it out now as they may no longer be under construction soon.

The Iconfactory Under Construction

The shift in official policy has thrilled former members of the
cabal. To them, the war in Lebanon represents the final step in
their plan to turn Iran into the next Iraq. Ledeen, writing in the
National Review on July 13th, could hardly restrain
himself. "Faster, please," he urged the White House, arguing that
the war should now be taken over by the U.S. military and expanded
across the entire region. "The only way we are going to win this
war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus, and they
are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their
terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel
on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it," he
concluded. "There is no other way."

James Bamford echo's Rattle's recent posts in Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone : Iran: The Next War

I'm sure that many of you have seen the rash of news media reports this year discussing the use of MySpace by online predators to contact young children, and calling on the government to "do something" about it. While this certainly does happen, I don't know how widespread the problem is, and I suspect the news media has overhyped it because it makes for dramatic television. The U.S. House responded on July 28th, 2006 by passing the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), by a landslide margin (410-15). I find this legislation to be deeply troubling, and that is why I am posting this bulletin.

There are many ways that Congress could have decided to respond to the problem of online predators. The most obvious approach is to seek to educate children and their parents about the danger of interacting with strangers online, in exactly the same way that we educate them about the danger of interacting with strangers in real life. DOPA creates the appearance of attempting to do this by directing the Federal Trade Commission to establish a website with this sort of information on it, but its primary purpose is different. DOPA's primary purpose is to make it illegal for any school or library which receives federal funding (about 2/3rds of them) to allow people under the age of 18 to use any website that enables users to create a personal profile, keep an online journal, chat with friends, or otherwise express themselves.

The United States Constitution protects certain fundamental human rights. Foremost
among these are the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of association. We protect these two rights in particular because they are prerequisites to democracy. The ability to vote for the representative of your choosing requires an environment in which you can consider and discuss the options freely. It is obvious that much of our democratic discourse has moved online in the past decade. Given how important these rights are to our identity as Americans, I am deeply troubled that so many of our representatives would be so eager to pass a broad prohibition on online discourse by minors.

DOPA will have three primary effects. The direct impact will be to remove online social communication tools from most schools and libraries. I'm talking about websites like MySpace, Facebook, Livejournal, Friendster, Google Groups, Blogger, Slashdot, and MemeStreams, as well as instant messagers like AIM and other chat software. Even adults will find it difficult to access these resources from libraries as they'll be forced to ask that library administrators remove blocks and filters for them. The secondary impact is that DOPA sends a message to schools and libraries that don't receive federal funding, as well as parents, that a complete ban on the use of online communications tools is a reasonable response to the problem of online predators. It is no more reasonable then prohibiting teenagers from going outside of their... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

This webpage is a news digest of all the latest blog entries and news stories regarding the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which would force schools and libraries that receive federal Internet subsidies to block all interactive websites in the name of online safety.

Online aggregator for monitoring the inevitable passage of the intollerable act of 2006.

DOPA Watch