U.S. federal agents have been given new powers to seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and hold them for unspecified periods the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Under recently disclosed Department of Homeland Security policies, such seizures may be carried out without suspicion of wrongdoing, the newspaper said, quoting policies issued on July 16 by two DHS agencies.
Agents are empowered to share the contents of seized computers with other agencies and private entities for data decryption and other reasons, the newspaper said.
DHS officials said the policies applied to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens, and were needed to prevent terrorism.
But, of course, there need be no suspicion of wrong-doing. Lovely.
One gets the impression sometimes that the goal of the US government of late is to make travel as unpleasant as possible in general and to specifically make it less likely that tourists and businesspersons from abroad will want to come to do business in our country.
Of course, it is a all good and justifiable because it is “needed to prevent terrorism” so it must be okay, yes?
So, if i go abroad with my laptop or other electronic device I risk it being seized upon my return for an unspecified amount of time on the whim of a DHS employee?
The policies state that officers may “detain” laptops “for a reasonable period of time” to “review and analyze information.” This may take place “absent individualized suspicion.”
The policies cover “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,” including hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover “all papers and other written documentation,” including books, pamphlets and “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter.’ “
This is remarkable and alarming given that amount of private data that one might carry on these devices, let alone things like business and research materials that could be lost because DHS wants to look at your thumb drive.
The story continues:
When a review is completed and no probable cause exists to keep the information, any copies of the data must be destroyed. Copies sent to non-federal entities must be returned to DHS. But the documents specify that there is no limitation on authorities keeping written notes or reports about the materials.
This is unconscionable and unjustifiable–the government is asserting the right to look into private materials to then determine if there is probable cause to keep it? How this can be be in keeping with Fourth Amendment protections is beyond me.
The fact that this policy was a secret until it was forced into the light of day by advocacy groups makes the whole situation even more onerous.
UPDATE (James Joyner): I agree this policy is unconscionable. On its surface, however, it’s nothing new. This sort of thing — and worse — has been routine for decades in prosecuting the drug war.
”That searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border, should, by now, require no extended demonstration.” 87 Authorized by the First Congress, 88 the customs search in these circumstances requires no warrant, no probable cause, not even the showing of some degree of suspicion that accompanies even investigatory stops. 89 Moreover, while prolonged detention of travelers beyond the routine customs search and inspection must be justified by the Terry standard of reasonable suspicion having a particularized and objective basis, 90 Terry protections as to the length and intrusiveness of the search do not apply. 91
_______________
[Footnote 87] United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616 (1977) (sustaining search of incoming mail). See also Illinois v. Andreas, 463 U.S. 765 (1983) (opening by customs inspector of locked container shipped from abroad).
[Footnote 88] Act of July 31, 1789, ch.5, Sec. Sec. 23, Sec. 24, 1 Stat. 43. See 19 U.S.C. Sec. Sec. 507, 1581, 1582.
[Footnote 90] United States v. Montoya de Hernandez, 473 U.S. 531 (1985) (approving warrantless detention incommunicado for more than 24 hours of traveler suspected of alimentary canal drug smuggling).
[Footnote 91] Id. A traveler suspected of alimentary canal drug smuggling was strip searched, and then given a choice between an abdominal x-ray or monitored bowel movements. Because the suspect chose the latter option, the court disavowed decision as to ”what level of suspicion, if any, is required for . . . strip, body cavity, or involuntary x-ray searches.” Id. at 541 n.4.
It shouldn’t be surprising (even though, somehow, it always is) when a new justification is found.
A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.
Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.
The story notes that there was some suspicion about Ivins’ statements about alleged decontamination of anthrax spores.
The former official told The Times that Ivins might have hedged regarding reswabbing out of fear that investigators would find more of the spores inside or near his office.
The article also notes:
The family’s home is 198 miles — about a 3 1/2 -hour drive — from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where anthrax spores were found by investigators.
All of the recovered anthrax letters were postmarked in that vicinity.
The article does directly state, however, that Ivins was going to be arrested for the attacks themselves. I am not sure if that is the result of obtuse writing by the reporter, or hedging based on a lack of full knowledge.
I think that it would be extremely helpful to know exactly what happened with those attacks, as it would help us flesh out how to understand those attacks in the broader war on terror discussion. Indeed, I blame those anthrax attacks, so soon after 9/11 (see this LAT piece for a refresher), for helping to fully catapult the nation into the direction of believing that we really were set to face repeated terrorist attacks from abroad onto the United States itself. Certainly it was one of the pieces of evidence that convinced me, at the time, that a generalized war against terrorist groups made sense. In retrospect, we all read too much into that attack, especially if it can be confirmed that the source of the attack was a mentally unstable government microbiologist.
A federal grand jury was preparing to indict a Maryland bioweapons expert for his role in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and terrorized the country, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors were considering whether to seek the death penalty against Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked at an elite U.S. Army bioweapons laboratory in Fort Detrick. Ivins died Tuesday in an apparent suicide.
The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests that toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today. It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
It heads the world’s oldest top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton on Thursday.
A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”
The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons — “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”
“Jokes have varied over the years, with some taking the question and answer format while others are witty proverbs or riddles,” said the report’s writer Dr Paul McDonald, senior lecturer at the university. “What they all share however, is a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion. Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humor can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research.”
The study was commissioned by television channel Dave. The top 10 oldest jokes can be viewed at www.dave-tv.co.uk.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court has decided not to ban the ruling AK Party, accused of undermining the country’s secular system.
But the judges did cut half the AKP’s treasury funding for this year.
That’ll show ‘em! (I honestly have no idea which funds or what they are used for–and the story does not elaborate.)
In all seriousness, this is a healthy result for Turkish democratic development as well as a positive move for all who would like to see a functional example of democracy in an Islamic society.
Still, the overall situation is not at healthy as one might like:
At least seven of the 11 court judges would need to vote in favour for the party to be banned. But six judges wanted a ban and five did not want to do so.
Being one vote shy of being banned is escaping by the thinnest of margins.
If you use the self-check at Walmart, pick the Spanish language option–that way the durn thing won’t talk to you and tell you every inane thing it thinks you need to do. Since what one needs to do is pretty easy to understand, the inability to read the screen doesn’t matter.
So see, for those who get annoyed at “Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish” there is a silver lining after all.
Suicide bombers have killed at least 53 people and wounded about 240 in attacks on crowds in the Iraqi capital Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk.
Three blasts in Baghdad killed at least 28 Shia Muslim pilgrims heading for the city’s Kadhimiya shrine.
[...]
In Kirkuk, a suicide bomber targeted a crowd of Kurdish protesters, killing at least 25 and injuring at least 150.
Thankfully these types of attacks are far less common than they were just recently. The question occurs, of course, as to whether this represents an anomaly in post-surge Iraq or a sign that the peace is a tenuous one.
The strike in Kirkuk is especially of interest, given that the long-term status of the city is far from settled and one wonders what role violence will place in determining its ultimate status. Specifically Kirkuk is linked to major oil reserves and is disputed amongst the Kurds, Turkomen and the Arabs.
First, in thinking more about the movie, I will say that there are two scenes/actions by Batman that could be seen to mirror part of the GWoT debate (and I will be vague so as not to spoil anything). There is an interrogation scene and a scene about surveillance that raises privacy questions. I note, however, that in both cases they deal with a person who is known to be guilty and not only guilty, but still in the process of committing extremely violent crimes. Much like scenes in 24 or the ever-popular ‘ticking timebomb” scenario, the guilt and threat presented by the person against whom extraordinary measures are being used is unambiguous.
Of course, the irony on the interrogation scene is the information that the interrogator wants is ultimately freely shared (no extraordinary interrogation techniques were actually needed) and in regards to the privacy issue there is a rather clear check on the system that makes abuse of the system impossible. And again, in both scenes, the only person being harmed is as guilty as one can be–no real moral conundrum at all.
All of this feeds into my next point, which is that Matthew Yglesias captured well in the following sentence my basic point about the comparison of the movie to reality and where I disagree with Klavan as well as most of the commenters at OTB about the post:
I think Cheney would look at the movie and say “see — this is what we’re doing.” I look at the movie and say “see — if you were fighting a comic book bad guy and you were a comic book hero then your policies would make sense.”
And this is my basic point: the paradigm in fighting terroristic organizations is hardly that of the fight against the supervillain (regardless of how it is often presented as such to the public). As I noted yesterday, the destruction of Saddam (the supervillain in Iraq) did not solve the problem and while getting Osama bin Laden would be great, that won’t solve the problem of Islamic extremism. In the movies catching the Joker ends that problem, in real life getting the iconic leader may solve nothing.
Beyond that, like in the interrogation and surveillance examples above, the issues in the movie/comic is straightforward: focusing such tools only on the known supervillain. Yet in real life those tools end up being used on persons other than the villain because we are not always sure who the villain is. In the real world, people who don’t deserve to be sent to Guantanamo and hardly interrogated are and in the real world the innocent get caught up in the surveillance dragnet.
this is precisely why I would discourage people from trying to find the exact, real-world fit for the commentary made in The Dark Knight…it’s fantasy….real over the top, adolescent-inspired fantasy. The main character is a ninja that dresses up like a bat. The main bad guy is the lead singer of the Insane Clown Posse.
As such, it makes for a poor guide to much of anything in the real world.
