Border agents can search your electronic devices w/o suspicion of illegal activity!

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Since we live so close to the border, you should be aware of this:
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Border Agents’ Power to Search Devices Is Facing Increasing Challenges in Court
By SUSAN STELLIN, Published: December 3, 2012

The government has historically had broad power to search travelers and their property at the border. But that prerogative is being challenged as more people travel with extensive personal and business information on devices that would typically require a warrant to examine.

Several court cases seek to limit the ability of border agents to search, copy and even seize travelers’ laptops, cameras and phones without suspicion of illegal activity.

“What we are asking is for a court to rule that the government must have a good reason to believe that someone has engaged in wrongdoing before it is allowed to go through their electronic devices,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing plaintiffs in two lawsuits challenging digital border searches.

A decision in one of those suits, Abidor v. Napolitano, is expected soon, according to the case manager for Judge Edward R. Korman, who is writing the opinion for the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

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Courts have long held that Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches do not apply at the border, based on the government’s interest in combating crime and terrorism. But Mr. Pascal’s lawsuit and similar cases question whether confiscating a laptop for days or weeks and analyzing its data at another site goes beyond the typical border searches. They also depart from the justification used in other digital searches, possession of child pornography.

“We’re getting more into whether this is targeting political speech,” Ms. Crump said.

In another case the A.C.L.U. is arguing, House v. Napolitano, border officials at Chicago O’Hare Airport confiscated a laptop, camera and USB drive belonging to David House, a computer programmer, and kept his devices for seven weeks.

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The agency did provide recent statistics on how many travelers this policy affects. From Oct. 1, 2011, through Aug. 31, 2012, 11.9 million travelers were referred to secondary screening after entering the United States. Of those searches, 4,898 included an electronic device. In the previous year, 12.1 million people underwent additional screening, with 4,782 searches of electronic devices.

While there is little public information about who is pulled aside for extra scrutiny, some people whose laptops have been searched say they feel they were selected based on their academic, journalistic or political pursuits.

Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker and the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship, estimates that she has been detained more than 40 times upon returning to the United States. She has been questioned for hours about her meetings abroad, her credit cards and notes have been copied, and after one trip her laptop, camera and cellphone were seized for 41 days.

Ms. Poitras said these interrogations largely subsided after a Salon article describing her experiences was published in April, but she is editing her latest film in Europe to avoid crossing the border with her research and interviews. (The film, the third in a series about the war on terror, focuses on domestic surveillance.)

“I’m taking more and more extreme measures, to the point where I’m actually editing outside the country,” she said. “They use the border as a way to get around the law.”

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