US border guards can now search travelers’ laptops and other electronic gadgets without a show of reasonable suspicion. The ruling that human rights groups argue is just another example of aggressive government surveillance came Tuesday, after a US federal judge dismissed a lawsuit challenge on the border search policy.
The suit was filed by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of Pascal Abidor, a scholar with dual US-French citizenship, more than three years ago. Abidor said he was sitting in the train's cafe car when an officer forced him to take out his laptop and enter password.
The suit was filed by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of Pascal Abidor, a scholar with dual US-French citizenship, more than three years ago. Abidor said he was sitting in the train's cafe car when an officer forced him to take out his laptop and enter password.
The computer turned out to contain images of Hamas and Hezbollah rallies that the young man said he needed for his doctorate degree on the history of Shiites in Lebanon. The unnerved officers confiscated his laptop, handcuffed the man and questioned him repeatedly for three hours.
The government searched private material, including messages between Abidor and his girlfriend, and kept his data for further searches after giving back his laptop, the suit alleged. Abidor said they ddin't return the laptop with the sole copy of his graduate work for eleven days.
Border laptop searches are “part of a broader pattern of aggressive government surveillance that collects information on too many innocent people, under lax standards, and without adequate oversight,” the ACLU lawyer said in a statement about Tuesday’s ruling.
Judge Edward Korman of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, disagreed and threw out the suit. He cited a controversial legislation that makes Americans within 100 miles of the border eligible for a police check without reasonable suspicion.
The catch is that almost two thirds of Americans live within 100 miles of the US border. New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and dozens of other major metropolitan areas fall under the so-called “exemption” zone.
The Department of Homeland Security has reportedly searched 6,500 electronic devices between 2008 and 2010 alone, that’s out of 1.1 million people processed daily. However rights advocates argued that the ruling “allows the government to conduct intrusive searches of Americans’ laptops and other electronics at the border without any suspicion that those devices contain evidence of wrongdoing.”
RT, PCWorld
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