Battleangel

Random searches of laptops by the United States border police, without search warrants or probable cause. It isn’t “especially radical” says police state apologists. Think you have any freedom left? Think again.

The average American business traveler now has less legal rights than Islamic terrorists.

In August 2001, “20th hijacker” Zacharias Moussaoui was arrested for immigration violations in Minnesota, but the U.S. government was so concerned with his privacy rights that they wouldn’t let FBI agents search his laptop computer — a computer that held information about the hijacking attacks that would take place a month later.

But a U.S. citizen has no such protection from the government’s all-seeing eye.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled on Monday that “border police may conduct random searches of laptops without search warrants or probable cause.”

Of course to be fair, the reason Moussaoui’s laptop wasn’t subjected to the usual procedure was of course that a thorough and open search would have cast serious doubts on the patsy role later rewarded the somewhat kooky, but useful fall guy of choice. Even to the point that the much useful 9/11 would have been tragically avoided. But still, it speaks plenty of the way the US thinks it’s doing a helluva job ‘protecting’ its citizens.

If you have a laptop or a similar electronic storage device and you are planning to cross the border, I would suggest at the very least to empty cache data and all privacy related storage, do a wipe of the free space — or even better — wipe the free space AND encrypt and hide sensitive files, partitions using a system that allows for plausible deniability.