[Infowarrior] - Random Laptop Searchs at the Border Unconstitutional

[Richard Forno]

Random Laptop Searchs at the Border Unconstitutional

Customs agents must have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been
committed to search the laptops or other digital devices of citizens
entering the United States, according to a Los Angeles District Court.

While there's a broad border exception to Fourth Amendment, customs agents
must have, at the least, articulable and reasonable suspicion that a laptop
may have evidence of a crime before searching it, Judge Dean Pregeson ruled.
The ruling came in a case where customs agents searched the laptop of
Michael Arnold who was returning from the Philippines and subsequently found
images they believed to be child pornography. The evidence from the search
is now excluded from his trial for possession of child pornography.

"While not physically intrusive as in the case of a strip or body cavity
search, the search of one's private and valuable personal information stored
on a hard drive or other electronic storage device can be just as much, if
not more, of an intrusion in the dignity and privacy interests of a person.
This is because electronic storage devices function as an extension of our
own memory," Pregeson wrote in an October 2, 2006 opinion (.pdf). The judge
was not convinced that the custom inspector's rationale for pulling Arnold
aside (being a man aged 20 to 59 returning from Southeast Asia) counted as
reasonable suspicion.

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http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/10/random_laptop_s.html