Welcome to the U.S. Please Remove Your Clothes

Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008

Read more about living overseas in International Living Postcards —your daily escape

Dear International Living Reader,

Last time I flew to the U.S., I took my laptop with me.

But only because U.S. Customs and Border Protection allowed me to.

Under Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies, federal officials can seize anyone’s laptop, cell phone, PDA, BlackBerry, DVDs, or any other electronic equipment or media they want at the border.

They can keep it for as long as they want.

They can give it to anyone they want for decryption and analysis.

And they don’t need any probable cause or suspicion of a crime to do it.

I’m not kidding.

You can find the policies here and here.

I found out about this last month in a Washington Post article I saw during our recent Live and Invest in Panama seminar. I mentioned it to my friend, seminar presenter, and privacy advocate, Bob Bauman.

“That’s been the case for years,” he said.

I hadn’t heard about it because it wasn’t disclosed by the DHS until last month after pressure from civil liberties and business travel groups.

The DHS justifies this policy by saying that the searches and seizures are useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating “copyright or trademark laws.”

Does that mean they can throw me in the slammer if they seize my laptop and find an illegally downloaded song in my iTunes folder?

Can they grill me in the back room if they search my e-mails and journal and find an occurrence of the word “dope”?

Can they lock me up if they find the picture my sister sent me of my infant niece and nephew in a bubble bath...naked?

Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold says he finds the current situation disturbing and plans to introduce a bill that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches.

That does not inspire confidence. Imagine an overworked, underpaid, poorly trained customs grunt at the immigration facility in Newark or Houston or Atlanta or Los Angeles.

What would constitute “reasonable suspicion” to them?

Bushy eyebrows? Polyester pants? Being too short? Being too tall?

Or maybe—most suspicious of all—a suspicious lack of anything suspicious?

That’s not my real worry, though.

My real worry is what happens when they finally catch a real terrorist at the border with bomb plans tattooed on his or her chest.

Will that justify random, warrantless, no-probable-cause strip searches at the U.S. border?

It all makes me think a little more seriously about which side of that border I really want to live on when that happens.

Best regards,

Dan Prescher
Publisher, International Living