Does your laptop have anything to declare?

Now the files and photos on your laptop are fair game to customs agents at LAX and no, unlike the police, they don't need probable cause to search them. That's the latest ruling, handed down yesterday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The search-and-seizure case got started when a U.S. Customs inspector found child porn on a laptop belonging to O.C. resident Michael Arnold when he passed through LAX in 2005 after a trip to the Phillipines.

Marilyn Bednarski, Arnold's lawyer, says she'll ask for a new hearing, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

A search of a personal computer is more intrusive than an inspection of someone's car or luggage, she said, because people use computers as "an extension of ourselves. It really is like looking into someone's mind, rather than looking into a box or a folder or a purse."

The ruling would authorize airport searches of other electronic devices such as cellphones without evidence of wrongdoing, Bednarski said.

Arnold had been randomly chosen by customs agents for the search. They powered up his laptop, searched the desktop and folders and found the pornography. He now faces charges of possessing and transporting child porn. If convicted, he faces 30 years in federal prison.

More at Law.com, Reuters, Daily Breeze and the WSJ's Law Blog.

--Veronique de Turenne

Photo: Tribune Media Services

Comments

[Rock]

So, what if you have MP3's? The government is in full support of RIAA. Any music not on a legit CD is questionable and probably illegal by RIAA standards.

Government is getting too intrusive. Some fool is going to say what do you have to hide? OK, carrying the logic forward. Let's live in a police state where we have no rights. What do we have to hide?

[inconvenient truth]

How long should I expect to wait while some 20-something kid searches my 160GB hard drive, rifling through gigabytes of JPGs of my family and making copies of my own copyrighted data, contravening the laws being used by the RIAA to secure millions from the ignorant grannies of computer savvy teens?

All this precedent does is alert purveyors of child pornography to encrypt their porn and upload it for later retrieval... thus evading detection at the border... or wear a turbin. No one will ever dare to search someone who looks like a muslim for fear of ACLU lawsuits.

[Rrrick]

Do we have ANY rights left?? I'm sorry, my laptop gets cookies and photos downloaded into it as I surf. Also I let other people use my laptop. How the heck does the Court think that customs has the right to "strip search" my hard drive.
What would you do if you were charged for some darn files that you never loaded?.....anyone ever heard about computers being turned into Zombies, and being used to send out SPAM. Much of it can be porn.

God help our country. If the far-ging lawyers don't destroy us, the idiots
working in the courts are going to violate what rights we thought we had.

This case must be over turned. If you want to search my hard drive, get
a warrant!

[Omega Wolf]

The courts are nothing more than the yes men for a corrupt government. Instead of defending our rights, they trample them into the earth and further subjugate us to the tender mercies of these tyrants.

My only advice to people traveling abroad is to have a separate laptop, MP3 player, cell phone, etc., which contains no important data and that anything you wish to keep you email to yourself or FedEx to your home address.