No Shame

Two big border revelations this month. First one is that U.S. border agents now are entitled to remove your laptop computer from your hot little hands should you present yourself at the border with said laptop. And they may take it away from you for an indeterminate period of time, and forget about your Constitutional rights, I guess, because if you are presenting yourself to the U.S. border agents, you aren’t actually in the U.S., my friend. Furthermore, the 9th Circuit Appellate Court has agreed that this is a situation in which search does not require a warrant nor reasonable cause nor I guess any cause at all. You can read about this more fully here. Schneier, a security expert, also includes information about how to avoid having information on your laptop when you cross borders.

And the second? Well every border crossing now includes the creation of a permanent record of you making that crossing and your picture is attached to the record. Said record to be preserved by the government for fifteen years. Furthermore, it is not just the information obtained from your passport that is to be part of this record but any other information obtained during a secondary inspection. You can read about this part more fully here. Hard to know exactly who eventually will have access to such information.

The Congress, of course, has not authorized any of this, but then they haven’t yet been given the opportunity, I suppose. Inevitably, this offers enormous possibilities for irritating events here at the Point Roberts border where we make crossings so frequently. If nothing else, all of us Point Roberts’ residents’ back and forths to the laundromat and the thrift store and the grocery store will use up a lot of K’s of storage in the government’s data base, but I suppose we can learn to leave our laptops at home when going to those places. Don't say we weren't warned, because this is exactly what privacy advocates have been worried about with respect to new technologies for the past 30 years or more: that the government would simply have everything about us in its files, to be used for any purposes that it chooses. I know, they keep saying they’re doing it only to protect us from terrorists, but that ruse is getting a little old since they don’t seem to have shown much skill in catching any terrorists. And every day there seems to be some new story about misuse of data base information. I mean, think about all those medical records of celebrities being perused by interested staff at the UCLA Medical Center.

Some commenters have been surprised that Homeland Security has authorized both these significant lurches toward privacy invasion without any official authorization; other have been not surprised by the decision itself, but appalled by the fact that they don’t even bother to keep it a secret. No shame at all any more is the sorry conclusion.