Crossing the Border with Your Laptop? Delete Those Pam Anderson Videos First!

Kevin Maney panics: It's bad enough the shoes have to come off in the security line, revealing for all my multi-colored striped socks with individual toes. But they can take my laptop? And go through the files? And maybe find those Captain and Tenille songs on my hard drive??! OMG, I'd die.

Well, the front page of today's Washington Post tells us the Feds can, in fact, confiscate and search your laptop when you cross the U.S. border -- for no reason whatsoever. This is extremely alarming and hopefully will lead to an uproar which will cause some Senator to hold a press conference, though our faith in Congress actually making it go away is limited. This issue, by the way, was not discovered by the Post, but by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which raised the issue in May after a federal court ruling made border laptop searches permissable. The site Boing Boing followed soon after with some ideas about how to protect yourself in case that happens, although -- as even Boing Boing admitted -- none of the ideas are particularly good ones.

Basically, the best idea here is for everyone to scream very loudly about this, until it changes. We didn't scream loudly enough about the shoe thing, and now look where we are.