Feds can grab your device at border

Orange County Register

Do you think you'll ever take a laptop, iPad, or smart phone with you on an international trip? Did you know that, when you get back to the United States, the Department of Homeland Security can search through your personal electronic devices, even if they have no reasonable cause for suspicion? Did you know that they can send you home and keep your computer or phone for days or even weeks, looking through your photos, archived emails and other private data at their leisure?

Searches of this kind are still unlikely to snare a given individual. But documents turned over to the ACLU suggest more than 6,500 travelers had their personal devices searched at a U.S. border during a two-year period that began during the Bush years and ended in the Obama era. A dozen people per day are now affected, the New York Times estimates.

Are these searches and seizures that the Fourth Amendment should protect us against? Civil-liberties advocates think so. But federal courts so far have disagreed.

Federal agents have long been empowered to search American citizens at the border in ways that would be deemed “unreasonable” if they happened anywhere else. Few object to answering questions posed at international crossings, or filling out reentry forms and opening up carry-ons and suitcase while clearing customs at LAX.

But the Bush administration promulgated new rules in 2008 about searching electronic devices. I contend that permitting these searches, without any warrant or reasonable suspicion, crosses an unacceptable line.

On the late-model iPhone I carry, a GPS component tracks my every movement: a knowledgeable person could literally download a complete log of where I've been. My electronic address book includes contact information for all of my friends and family. A text messaging app archives years of personal conversations with my wife, my parents and my closest friends. My call logs would permit an interested party to figure out my journalistic sources, the medical professionals I've visited and other personal details that I cannot even anticipate.

For many Americans, a smart phone or a laptop contains more sensitive personal information than you'd find if you broke into their house and rifled through their bedroom drawers. If there is reasonable suspicion that someone poses a danger to national security, by all means detain him and thoroughly search his effects. But for average American citizens who trigger no reasonable suspicion? It's unseemly to make them vulnerable to exposing so many private details of their lives to prying government officials just to reenter their own country.

And even if they haven't got any private data on your phone or computer, who can afford to lose their devices to government custody for 49 days, as happened to computer programmer David House? (His federal lawsuit challenging the practice is pending.)

Within Homeland Security, there is an Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, charged with reining in organizational excesses. Incredibly, after conducting a study of these searches, DHS released a statement defending them.

Hopefully, Congress or the courts will intervene to stop these intrusive searches. Meanwhile, if you're traveling and have data that you don't want to share with Uncle Sam, leave your electronic device at home, encrypt well, or upload your data to secure cloud storage and clear your device memory before traveling.

Register opinion columnist Conor Friedersdorf also is a staff writer

for the Atlantic.

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