Think Searching Your Laptop is Off-Limits? Think Again.

You think it's annoying when someone publicly rifles through your toiletries at the airport? Try having them rifle through--and keep copies of--the contents of your laptop.

The New York Sun points out today that according to recent court rulings, customs agents don't need a warrant or even a reasonable excuse to search personal electronics being brought into America.

The Sun also says that according to business and civil liberties advocates speaking at a Senate hearing yesterday, customs officials can (and sometimes do) copy and keep for themselves data stored on a digital camera or BlackBerry, or even the entire hard drive of a laptop.

Courts have allowed the searches based on the basis that electronic property isn't any different from the physical property travelers bring through customs--property that is legal to search.

Yet something seems so terribly, terribly wrong with the idea of the U.S. Customs Office having copies of my family vacation photos. Maybe it's because we carry far more in a laptop or P.D.A. than in our personal baggage.

Unlike with physical luggage, it's not as easy to pick and choose what digital property you bring abroad and what you leave at home. In that sense, carrying your laptop is less like carrying a briefcase than porting your entire office through security.

But the main difference with the electronic searches is the keeping copies part--when a customs agent rifles through your bag, he doesn't keep a copy of all the clothes you own. Once confidential and/or personal documents, photos, and correspondence are copied they are out of your control, capable of being recopied and distributed far and wide. The electronic search policy would seem to have serious implications for businesses, which don't tend to like giving the government full reign of their files without probable cause.

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