4th Amendment? You don’t need the 4th Amendment unless you’re hiding something

I’m going to admit something here, right now, just so it’s off my chest: I am a libertarian. I’m registered as one in my state, I’m a card-carrying party member, and before my most recent job forbade me for engaging in such practices, I vigorously campaigned for the party. I support Mike Gravel and Ron Paul and would die to vote for a Gravel/Paul ticket in this upcoming election cycle.

Having said that, I’m sure you can imagine how happy I am that the US 9th District Court of Appeals has decided that the information on laptops are able to be searched, seized, and confiscated indefinitely by border control.

It all stems from a case, apparently, where an individual traveling from the Philippians to the United States was stopped by DHS / US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and his laptop searched. It was there that they discovered child pornography and the man was promptly arrested and charged as appropriate. His attorney argued that the man’s 4th Amendment rights were violated, but the 9th District jurists decided differently. When you go through customs, you should have no expected right to privacy or expectation of 4th amendment protection, essentially.

The usual arguments about “you shouldn’t worry about it unless you have something to hide” are easily put down like a second place Kentucky Derby horse (Is it too soon? It is, isn’t it?) There are many reasons an individual may want to keep the contents of their laptops hidden from prying eyes. First of all, there are private photos that may end up in the wrong hands, like the young woman who became an unwitting porn star at her local Best Buy. Or there are the numerous businessmen and attorneys who travel internationally for business with private, sensitive information. CNet points out that journalists too are effected as their anonymous sources’ identities could be compromised. Will there be a separate line for CIA agents working under cover or will we have many more Valerie Plames in the near future? And then there are the artists and writers and photographers whose work may be deemed as illegal and offensive by one agent and artistic and acceptable by another.

Remember the trouble Nabakov had with Lolita, kids? Now imagine just trying to be the publisher bringing that over on a laptop and it getting into the hands of a John Wayne customs officer going to save the kidlets from the terrorists and pedophiles like he’s the next Chris Hansen.

Was it always this way, or is this yet another sweeping power of the executive branch granted to us from on high by the great and powerful George W. Bush? Only time may tell. Over at the Consumerist, several readers had rather inventive suggestions for combating ICE, or at least messing with them, including renaming all of your files “kiddie p0rn” and changing every icon on your desktop to a link to your own downloaded copy of 2girls1cup. Some others suggested traveling with a completely empty laptop and doing all work from a remote server inside the country or keeping all of your information on the SD card tucked neatly away inside your camera with your vacation photos or using your iPod’s disk usage feature.

CNet, however, has a different approach: encrypt first, ask questions later. Additionally, they recommend:

1. Shut your computer down for at least five minutes before entering customs, as this will erase passwords stored in RAM
2. Erase your cookies, cache, browser history, and saved passwords
3. The Feds may install spyware on your hard drive — keep your spyware detection software as up to date as possible and, if your computer gets confiscated, boot from a DVD or other OS to see if anything on your hard drive has been tampered with.
4. The Feds may also try to get to your memory through FireWire ports — guard against it by “setting an Open Firmware password disables physical memory access for FireWire devices”
5. Finally, conceal your data so that know one even knows it’s there. Remember kids, encrypted data is suspicious, but you can’t be suspicious of something you can’t see.