Federal Judge Limits DHS Laptop Border Searches 359
Declan McCullogh is reporting at CNET that a federal district court judge has rebuked the Department of Homeland Security, "which had claimed it can seize a traveler's laptop and search it six months later without warrant." As described in the article, DHS policies have been stacked against travelers entering the US, including citizens returning from abroad: "There's no requirement that they be returned to their owners after even six months or a year has passed, though supervisory approval is required if they're held for more than 15 days. The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets." This ruling does not address immediate searches at the border, but says that DHS cannot hold computers for indefinite searching, as in the case to hand, concerning a US citizen returning from a trip to Korea, whose laptop was seized and held for months before a search was even conducted on it.
Revenge (Score:5, Funny)
The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:2, Insightful)
They are still out there. The Supreme Court has been loaded with ideologues and until one of them leaves the bench we are stuck with a judicial system that has been gamed for the sake of the wealthy and well-connected who care nothing for
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank goodness Obama has done so much to fix all that.
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The liberals happily supported Obama, even though they had many other Democrat candidates to pick from. IMO, the Democrats managed to pick the very worst candidate out of all those running in the Primaries. (I believe the Republicans managed to do the same.) Any of the other Democrats running would have been better than Obama.
So it's not Bush's awfulness that's to blame, it's the dumb liberals who thought that Obama was their savior who are to blame. Bush is only to blame for what he did while in office
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Simply not possible.
What I think is going on here, is that Obama is being called awful simply because he's not a savior. There are a lot of big messes going on right now, people. Any one of them would be the most notabl
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>>>at least now the economy has been pulled back from the cliff.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Boy that was a good joke. The Euro is collapsing (due to extreme debt collapsing Member States), and the Dollar is on the brink itself. Yeah the economy is still on the edge of the cliff. What was a bad stock crisis has now become a much, much worse currency crisis.
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:4, Interesting)
The great depression was extended for years due to to the action the government took to end it. Now we are doing the same thing again with the stimulus. Expect this recovery to last a while.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx [ucla.edu]
Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.
In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.
Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.
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Logic like that is why nobody takes economists too seriously.
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A chimpanzee could do just as effective a job as President as him
Actually, we already tried that. George W Bush did a much worse job than Obama is doing.
So we've changed from a chimpanzee to a baboon. Great. Big improvement. Chimps are actually smarter than baboons.
I think the real problem is that, after eight ruinous years of Bush, people were looking for a savior. What we got was an everyday politician. Obama is not great, but he's not bad either. I would prefer to have a great president, but I'll sett
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Well, I just think Palin would tear it to pieces faster.
Yes, definitely. She'd probably start a nuclear war or something.
But, we are rapidly entering the kind of mentality that got us into the original Civil War. The main difference is that the battle lines are not as strictly drawn on state lines.
Yep. It seems to be more urban vs. rural, but still more complex than that. The country is pulling apart in many directions, over many issues: immigration, spending, bailouts, foreign wars, taxation, corporate
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>>>I've completely lost all hope that the American public is able to pick any type of decent leader.
Maybe it's time to go back to how it was done in 1792, 1796, 1800, et cetera - let the States pick the president of the Union. The People already have representation in both the House and Senate, and in their local State Legislatures..... so it's not as if they won't be heard.
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I'm starting to think things were better back then because not everyone was allowed to vote. Only white, male landowners. This kept all the uneducated idiots from voting for bad politicians. Maybe we should re-institute something like this, only without the race, gender, and landowning requirements, and make it education-based. No one without a college education can vote, or perhaps require a high school diploma at the least.
If we restricted voting to people who have been taught some amount of critical-
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>>>Only white, male landowners.
False. Several states, especially the northern ones, allowed women to vote in the 1700s. And blacks. Some let people without property vote as well, although that was rarer. To say "only" is a distortion of history.
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Whoops, I was under the impression that it was restricted that way everywhere. Guess not. Makes sense, though: things were more different state-to-state back then than they are now.
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>>>There was nothing in the Constitution that allowed other races to vote until 1870
But the U.S. Constitution is just ONE constitution of several. There were state constitutions as well, and the northern constitutions allowed "freemen" (blacks) to vote the same as whites. And for women: New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and a few others allowed female suffrage.
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Wrong. The liberals happily supported Kucinich, but gritted their teeth and did their best when it came to Obama and Clinton, because they know the game is rigged. The only people who 'loved' them were status-quo centrists. Or, as they were known back in the 50s, Republicans.
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Um, no. Obama wasn't picked by Republicans, he was picked by people who registered themselves as Democrats and voted in the Primaries for him. Just like McCain was picked by people who registered themselves as Republicans. If any centrists voted in the Primaries for Obama, it's because they identified themselves as Democrats.
The game is only rigged in the sense that the voting system sucks, by not allowing preferential choice (as other systems, like IRV do), and because it's party-based.
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You're aim is poor, because you're targeting the wrong person. I hate corporations. Centralized power of ANY kind, whether it is in a corporation or government, is dangerous to individual liberty. I guess that's why I hated BOTH bush and Øbama.
Why must decisions always be placed in someone else's hands? Why can't I make my OWN decisions of what I want to buy, or wish to work, or desire to live. Bush/Obama both tried to take away my freedom of choice. As if I'm serf.
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Interesting)
Centralized power of ANY kind, whether it is in a corporation or government, is dangerous to individual liberty.
In the absence of some outside restraining force, how do you avoid the inevitable natural concentration of power when everything is left to its own forces? Neither governments nor corporations appeared out of thin air; similar institutions have inevitably been created by people of civilizations that are very different otherwise. This seems to imply that the very nature of human society leads to them.
Government, in that sense, is an attempt to curb the threat of centralized power by trying to have a single entity, which is at least nominally controllable, and can all other such entities - corporations - in check. It is itself effectively a private corporation (for citizens only) with non-transferable shares. Without its regulative effects, you instead have a bunch of completely uncontrollable, powerful entities that fight each other by all means available. Worst-case scenario is that they form a cartel, and then you have a corporatist dictatorship. So what do you propose?
Why must decisions always be placed in someone else's hands? Why can't I make my OWN decisions of what I want to buy, or wish to work, or desire to live.
The other side of a coin is having more than one choice. Elections were commonplace in all communist states, and they're still held in e.g. North Korea. It's just that the list of candidates is such that choice is meaningless. But the same effect can also be achieved economically, through monopolistic collusion - when your choice is not "buy X or Y", but "buy X or don't buy at all" - and for some categories of goods (e.g. food), the latter simply isn't an option. And a similar scheme with an even greater potential for abuse is possible on the job market...
Thank God! (Score:3, Funny)
Thank God!
As opposed to a central corporate string-pulling government economy...
...we are SO lucky the newly elected government fixed the corporate string-pulling of government before some terrible disaster or environmental catastrophe took place!
-- Terry
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Obama is very far from Lenin.
Obama hasn't instituted the killing of people politically opposed to him, nor has there been a mandate to sell off farms Zimbabwe style with a mandatory percentage of the crops going to the urban workers.
Obama maybe left of Bush and a bit left of the Clintons, but he is far from European Labour or the Greens and way right of Soviet Union Communist Party.
Lenin (Score:3, Informative)
>>>Obama hasn't instituted the killing of people politically opposed to him
I don't recall Lenin doing that either, after the old dictatorship had been toppled, a new government had been instituted and peace achieved.
Lenin achieved peace? And he didn't have those politically opposed to him killed? AHAH! He did neither. By decree Lenin established the Cheka [wikipedia.org] (secret police), the precursor to the KGB. The Cheka was run by Felix Dzerzhinsky [wikipedia.org] who was widely known as a large scale human rights violato
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Requiring people to have healthcare so they can stay healthy is uhm a bit on the oppsite side of the spectrum of a man responsible for murdering ~4 million men, women and children.
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P.S. Also you didn't answer the question: How can Obama BE any more liberal? He's only a few steps away from where Lenin stood on the political spectrum (central planning).
Wow. Just.... wow.
Folks, this is probably the most graphic display of how far to the right the American political spectrum is skewed you're likely to see for some time.
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His Democrats Congress passed a bill, and he signed into law, a requirement that I MUST buy health insurance, or be punished (fined $950). Now they are pushing a bill that would require me to have a license to publish on the web. Plus this idea to charge people for how much carbon they use. They bail-out companies like GM that should be been allowed to pass away.
What's next? I buy a normal car instead of a hybrid car, and I get fined $1000 per year? This is called central government control of the econ
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unless you are self employed the option is for a Company to either offer you health care or your company pay a fine to decline it.
Given that health insurance companies want someone earning $30,000 to pay $15,000 a year for health care is the real problem. What's worse is that the person earning $100,000+ a earn pays less than $5,000 for even better coverage.
1 in 6 American's are currently without health insurance, some are by choice but for most the choice was made by health insurance companies that won't
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No the real problem is that someone making $30,000 a year expects someone else to pay $15,000 to take care of their health.
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>>>$15,000 a year for health care
Bull. Shit. The Nationwide Company quoted high-deductible, catastrophic insurance for me. $140/month. I then negotiated the price downto $95, so that's only ~$1200 a year. Other than those living on the street, anybody could afford that. It's less than what most people spend for cable TV and cellphone. If money is tight, cancel the cable/cellphone and then you'll have the money to buy this same plan I am currently investigating.
>>>1 in 6 American's
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"...quoted high-deductible, catastrophic insurance..."
So...in other words..insurance that's basically useless for:
A) Anyone who has a chronic health problem.
B) Anyone who occasionally visits a doctor for routine health care and check ups
OR
c) for a family or couple.
Thanks for making *that* convincing argument!
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:4, Insightful)
"...quoted high-deductible, catastrophic insurance..."
So...in other words..insurance that's basically useless for:
A) Anyone who has a chronic health problem.
B) Anyone who occasionally visits a doctor for routine health care and check ups
OR
c) for a family or couple.
You left out a very important OR
d) Anyone who wants to pay out of pocket for regular medical expenses.
I'd rather have catastrophic medical coverage and use a health saving account to pay ordinary medical costs. If I were married, even if I had children, I'd still prefer my option. The only thing that would change that is an expensive chronic issue. In which case I'd be willing to pay more for more coverage. Unlike others I believe in personal responsibility.
Falcon
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a requirement that I MUST buy health insurance, or be punished (fined $950)
So buy insurance. If you don't, nobody's going to just let you die because civilized countries, decent humans, don't do that. If you get sick and can't afford the hospital stay that would make you healthy again, then somebody's going to pay for it anyway -- that somebody being the taxpayer. So we don't care if you're young and healthy and say you don't need it when the truth is you'd rather gamble with our money, and we don't really lend much credence to accusations of immorality from anyone who suggests
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a requirement that I MUST buy health insurance, or be punished (fined $950)
So buy insurance. If you don't, nobody's going to just let you die because civilized countries, decent humans, don't do that. If you get sick and can't afford the hospital stay that would make you healthy again, then somebody's going to pay for it anyway -- that somebody being the taxpayer.
That might be true elsewhere but not in the US. Taxpayers don't pay the medical bills for those unable to pay, those who use medical services pa
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Insightful)
You do pay your own bills, through taxes. Everyone shares the cost.
Consider the alternative that you're suggesting. You suggest that people who get sick should have to pay for their care, as if it's a good/service that they're consuming. But the sick are in a situation where declining to visit the doctor can put a human life at risk!
The thing that must be avoided at all cost is a financial disincentive to receive medical attention. That's the human rights part- a person in need of care should never have to balance their life against the needs of their family, and recovering people in a hospital should never have the additional burden of worrying about bills. The easiest way to accomplish this is to simply make medical care free, and to bill everyone. Sick people (who have enough to worry about anyway) aren't penalized for things out of their control, which I would think that Free Marketers would understand is pretty sensible from an economic perspective.
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I thought I pretty clearly stated that I do not think "whatever government does is right. Let's see...
Wait, I did very explicitly say that. Helps to read what you're responding to.
As to calling Godwin, that type of hyperbole fits to the definition what Godwin's Law was made fo
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Corporatism and central planning are the same thing - it's government and corporations working as one. Obama's policies certainly qualify
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That's an insightful idea: really, the problem from government central planning, and monopoly (or non-competitive oligopoly) central planning are about the same, aren't they? With no need to please the customer, problems don't get fixed. "We're AT&T: we don't have to." Corporate lobbying of government decision makers and coprorate lobbying of big monopoly players through partnership agreements, whic quite different in style, seem to end up working the same way.
Hmm, if only we could move the seat of p
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Oh, Yeah! That's just what I'd expect some Islamo-fascist, Maoist, Communist, Nazi, child-raping philatelist to say! ^_^
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Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've never understood this. Fascists supported a dictatorship where individual freedom is all but dead. Republicans support a libertarian philosophy (albeit not as extreme as the actual LP) for maximum individual freedom.
Republicans, not all but many, do not support the libertarian philosophy. That is why dissatisfied Republicans left the Republican Party to start the Libertarian Party. Republicans seek to restrict liberty just as much as Democrats do, only in different arenas. Businesses can do whateve
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Insightful)
It scares me how scared people are that they think this is rational behavior. The "reasonable suspicion" that the border agent had at the scene was:
Then they searched his laptop 3 times and found [pbfcomics.com] a single image of what appeared to be an adolescent girl naked on a beach, so they arrested him for possessing and transporting child pornography, and since it's federal, he's going to PMITA prison.
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not going to defend the Bush administration. But it is worth noting that Obama has been President for 1 1/2 years already and he's done pretty much nothing to roll that back. Bush hating made sense back in 2007 while we was still enacting crap like this, but its only fair to also be critical of the guy who came into office promising "change" and has instead protected the status quo (in terms of fascist analogies towards government).
you just don't understand "change" (Score:2)
What he meant was, after the massive corporate bailouts, the only thing left in the Treasury is some spare change.
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Yeah, just like how the economy is still in the toilet, and there's been no movement on healthcare. What has that prick been doing all this time?
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>It still scares me to see how badly the Bush administration has damaged democracy and the American constitution
Yes George Duh Bush is a git, but Obama signed the Patriot Act Renewal bill, so now he's just as much of a git. Obama should have kept his promise and let the Patriot Act expire. Obama's other broken promises:
1 - Stop snatching people off streets. Provide a Right to fair trial. - (REALITY: We no longer have Miranda rights even for U.S. citizens.) (Can be held indefinitely w/o trial)
2 - Right to Privacy - (They now spy on us via warrantless wiretaps and track our cellphones) (Patriot Act renewed by Obama.)
3 - No interrogation. Close Guantanamo. - (Revoked - now they interrogate American citizens too.)
4 - End the war. - (Now it's been extended two more years.)
So now we've had three shitty presidents in a row.
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:5, Insightful)
As a 2nd Amendment supporter, about the only thing I can say positive about Obama is that he signed the bill into law allowing people to carry firearms in National Parks. Of course, he didn't really want to sign that, but it was attached to some other crap he wanted, so he signed it anyway. So, in a way, Obama has been better for gun-rights supporters than Bush, who never signed any such bill, and also wanted to renew the idiotic "Assault Weapons Ban" (but Congress refused to renew it at the time so he never got to sign it).
As for shitty Presidents in a row, I think it's been a lot more than 3, unless you want to try to segregate them based on their shittiness. Honestly, I can't think of the last GOOD President this country has had. It certainly hasn't been within my lifetime. Eisenhower, perhaps? FDR? Jefferson? Washington? All the ones since the 60s have sucked:
JFK: Bay of Pigs
LBJ: Vietnam war, welfare
Nixon: extending Vietnam war, Watergate
Ford: dunno
Carter: ineffective in mideast crisis
Reagan: massive deficit spending on military, Iran-Contra affair
Bush I: Gulf War I, "read my lips: no new taxes"
Clinton: not horrible, but didn't do anything good either, stupidly got caught getting blowjob from ugly intern with loose lips; signed bill overturning Glass-Steagal Act leading to Mortgage Meltdown
Bush II: Afgh & Iraq wars, Patriot Act, Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, ineffective in Katrina, the list goes on and on
Obama: extending Afgh & Iraq wars, ineffective with BP oil spill, promised "change" but everything's still the same as under Bush even though he has a Democrat-controlled Congress to work with
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As a 2A supporter, you should have included the AWB under Clinton. As far as I'm concerned, presidents went down hill after Teddy Roosevelt.
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Ah, you're right. That was another Clinton failing.
Even Teddy wasn't that great: he got us involved in the war in the Philippines, IIRC, which was probably the start of America's imperialism.
I think presidents went downhill after Washington, though those first few were all pretty decent.
Re:The rollback of the Bush era infringements (Score:4, Informative)
Clinton signed CALEA, DMCA, and yet another copyright duration extension (whoever gets elected in 2012 will need to sign another one too, I think).
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Compared to what Lincoln and Wilson did, the Bush Administration was a minor league play.
Hell, or what happened under Jackson.
Indian Removal Act was far more damaging than anything Bush did or dreamed of doing.
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Wasn't there a few Democrats in power when all of these laws enabling this bullstuff were being passed?
Burned CDs (Score:2, Informative)
A computer engineer I worked with was going through the border and was apparently not allowed to have burned CDs of software on him. He just so happened to have a very stable version of XP he didn't want to get rid of. Solution: Stick it in the CD drive, put the battery somewhere and they won't take the time to check the drive.
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No CDs?? I would like to see the rule on that, that would mean you can't bring music CDs, and you might as well not have CDR disks anyway, if you can't use them while you are out. This doesn't sound legit.
Re:Burned CDs (Score:5, Insightful)
No CDs?? I would like to see the rule on that, that would mean you can't bring music CDs, and you might as well not have CDR disks anyway, if you can't use them while you are out. This doesn't sound legit.
what part of DHS does?
Re:Burned CDs (Score:5, Informative)
What rule? What a custom agent says is the rule. If you question it, or even hesitate [wikipedia.org], you earn a beat down and a felony conviction.
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Something similar happened to me when I crossed into Canada. I just happened to have water filters in my trunk, and the guy labeled in "commercial products" and refused to let me enter, although I explained it was my own personal items. So I dumped them in a trash barrel and continued through.
Finally ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad to see that the law is finally curtailing some of these absurd laws. For the last bunch of years a bunch of draconian policies have been deemed legal "because we say so". It's about fucking time the courts started bitch-slapping these down.
America has become absurd, and many people simply won't go there while it's like this.
I think every country should start doing exactly the same things to all US citizens. Let's see how long it takes before Americans start to complain about being fingerprinted, cavity searched, and arbitrarily detained.
I like most Americans, but your fucking government is out of control.
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I propose the opposite. I propose we make it as nice as possible for US citizens to enter other countries, so they can see just how ugly the US border policies are by comparison.
US tourist #1: "Yeah, it was cool! We arrived in Australia and the border guards gave us barbecued prawns!"
US tourist #2: "And then we got back to the US and all we got was fingerprinted and a cavity search..."
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I think every country should start doing exactly the same things to all US citizens. Let's see how long it takes before Americans start to complain about being fingerprinted, cavity searched, and arbitrarily detained.
I like most Americans, but your fucking government is out of control.
I find that, in general, my countrymen and women who are most opposed to ridiculousness like this are the very ones who leave the US the most often. Those numbskulls who approve of treating all international travelers like terrorists on the other hand stay at home
Maybe its that travellers experience security theater firsthand and then become opposed to it. Maybe it's more that people who want full body cavity searches of all people coming into the US are so xenophobic about the evil non-americans trying t
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"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson
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Can I choose? Please?
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The irony is that when Jefferson was faced with his own version of the Patriot Act (the 1790s Alien and Sedition Act), he did not immediately reach for the gun. Instead he advised the Member States refuse to enforce the law as unconstitutional, and then he organized the Democrats to take-back the Congress from the Federalists. The act was repealed in 1803.
In contrast Obama RENEWED Bush's act. Hmmm. What we really need is this to kill the Patriot Act:
The "Protect the 9th and 10th Amendments" Act.
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It has worked this way for 200+ years (Score:2, Informative)
A country has ALWAYS had the right to fully inspect or seize ANYTHING coming in across its border!
.
And that includes laptops. The rules haven't suddenly changed. You just noticed that you don't like the rules. And EVERY country has this right (whether or not they can enforce it is another matter).
Customs officials ALWAYS had the right to search your bags. Now you have this magical Bag of Holding, your laptop, that can hold a God awful lot of things. They still get to search it. It is still just a bag,
Re:It has worked this way for 200+ years (Score:5, Informative)
The U.S. is generally a country with some notion of property rights, though, so the police cannot arbitrarily seize and keep things if no law was violated, even at borders. They can search luggage entering the country, sure, but this case was about whether the police may keep a laptop for six months or longer without any sort of forfeiture proceeding or at least some sort of showing that the laptop was contraband under U.S. law and properly subject to confiscation.
Re:It has worked this way for 200+ years (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, they can. They do it all the time. Try traveling somewhere with a large amount of cash (even inside the country). If the cops find out, they'll seize the cash and let you go because they have nothing to charge you with. You don't get the cash back though.
The US used to have a notion of property rights, embodied in the 4th Amendment, but that notion is long gone, and the 4th Amendment is now null and void.
Re:It has worked this way for 200+ years (Score:4, Insightful)
And you can't even blame "fear of terrorists". We gave away the 4th Amendment for the War on Drugs, and we'll never get it back. The cops can just take your stuff for fun now, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's not even a "border" thing.
Re:It has worked this way for 200+ years (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah see, that's where you are wrong. I don't mind inspecting, even reasonable searches, but seizing anything? At least there needs to be a reason like it's contraband or illegal. Seizing equipment because they can is the same thing as stealing private property, and as far as i know that's covered by the 5th amendment of the constitution. You want to take my property? Fine, just provide me with enough cash so that my property, time spent on it and sensitive information on it is completely compensated for.
Re:It has worked this way for 200+ years (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>A country has ALWAYS had the right to fully inspect or seize ANYTHING coming in across its border!
Where in the Constitution was the United States government given that power of unlimited property theft (or limitless imprisonment)??? MY reading of the constitution says the exact opposite (Bill of Rights, sections 5 and 9 and 10).
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You have to BE here to be receive your guaranteed rights (assuming you get them when you're here, that is...)
When re-entering the country, you might legally be considered to not yet be 'in' the country, and so you get limited or no rights. If you think this is bogus, Try arguing over a bottle of single-malt scotch with a Customs agent. They can strip-search you if they think there's either contraband or declarable goods on or in you. Yes, they can.
Tax authorities get away with a lot in the US. Whether th
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You have to BE here to be receive your guaranteed rights
No, you have your rights no matter where you are. That's why they're called "natural rights"; everyone has them. More to the point, to the extent that someone is acting as an agent of the US government under the authority of the US Constitution their authority is limited to that actually granted by the Constitution. The Constitution does not grant the US government or its agents the authority to perform any search or seizure without a warrant. If anyone were to perform such a search or seizure without a war
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A friend of mine is in Turkey now. He doesn't enjoy the same rights there as he does here.
Your rights must protected and enforced.
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He has the same rights there as he has here. Enforcement is a separate issue. The US Constitution doesn't grant rights, it simply states that the government is required to respect them in exchange for receiving whatever appearance of legitimacy the Constitution can provide. The rights themselves exist independent of the Constitution, and predate the Constitution.
If rights only existed to the extent they could be enforced then it would be impossible to violate anyone's rights; the moment they were violated t
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Jurisdiction, anybody? (Score:3, Informative)
The complete contents of a hard drive or memory card can be perused at length for evidence of lawbreaking of any kind, even if it's underpaying taxes or not paying parking tickets.
Holy balls, Batman! The DHS is like the CIA, FBI, ATF, and IRS all in one! What's that? You don't even need an associates degree to join? Great Scott!
PortableApps.com + microSDHC (Score:5, Interesting)
PortableApps.com = move your digital life onto removable media, able to run on any PC.
microSDHC = 1-16GB storage on a sub-fingernail-sized removable media.
Unless they're gonna go thru all the lint in everyone's pockets, they can have the notebook.
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Mod this up...
Honestly there is absolutely no point to a laptop search, unless the physical laptop may have been tampered with (which the visual inspection already done for domestic travel would suffice). What keeps someone from putting data onto a memory card and sticking it into their phone / game system / whatever on a hidden partition? Or better yet, using the internet to simply transfer it from a public PC lab outside of the country to a server they set up inside (if they are a returning US citizen i
Re:PortableApps.com + microSDHC (Score:5, Insightful)
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I foresee TrueCrypt's website will be getting a lot of new visitors soon.
Re:Rights?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rights?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rights?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Rights are meant to protect you from a corrupt government. It is your duty as an American to resist a corrupt government just as the red coats were removed from this country by force after being told to leave so much for 'violence is never the answer.' Laws that make criminals easier to catch make revolutionaries against corrupt government easier to catch and the only one interested in that are the entrenched corrupt government. Liberties are meant to defend you from your government and should NEVER be surrendered. Violent revolution adds a physical cost to corrupt governance.
According to the Constitution there are rights we cannot be forced to give up because they were not given to us by men.
But they were sure taken by force by weak minded men
Re:Rights?! (Score:5, Insightful)
They weren't taken by force.
They were gleefully surrendered by frightened cowards.
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hand them over the password
Are you required by law to do this? If a United States customs agent wants to search your laptop, are you required by law to hand over your password? Or can you say "I choose not to give you my password." I realize in the parent's context it doesn't matter, but I'm just curious in general... In the same you're required to unlock your luggage so they can search it, are you required to unlock your computer?
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I foresee TrueCrypt's website will be getting a lot of new visitors soon.
Maybe, except most people are so clueless about security that encryption isn't even the first thing to do. Last week I had to explain to the owner of a small business that keeping saved copies of his tax forms--with SSN--on an unencrypted thumb drive was NOT safer than on his laptop ("where hackers could get into it, right?").
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I foresee TrueCrypt's website will be getting a lot of new visitors soon.
You know that in this case, you can be detained until you surrendered the password?
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Rights?! Rights?! This is Soviet America you don't need Rights so move on already!
These searches and bullshit by the grunts with the badges and guns are just for us little people. When you fly in on a private jet, the HMS is, let's say, much more courteous.
Now peon, quit your bitching about the order of things and get back to work with the rest of us nobodies!
Re:ruling makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'd say searching anyone's laptop as an unreasonable search and seizure, unless someone beat someone's head with the laptop and the laptop in question becomes a murder weapon.
We need judges who uphold the constitution and which deliver practical rulings to make us safer. All this does is further "legitimize" what should be an illegal practice by the DHS.
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Please tell me how warrantless searches of computers are legitimate to begin with.
It's called the Border Search Exception and it has a long history of being upheld by the Supreme Court. It has its roots in the acts of the First Congress in 1789. If you leave the country, you're subject to being searched upon return.
Re:ruling makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
We need government to be limited and this allows for baseless, pointless searches, both destroying freedom and destroying sane fiscal policies. This must be repealed either at the legislative or by the courts as unconstitutional.
And for those delusional masses who think that this prevents "terrorism", ask yourself, what computer file can be gotten in a foreign country that is illegal that can't be gotten via the internet?
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Re:ruling makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
When you are at the border you are no longer "in" the US. You are "between" countries. You have no rights.
Its like a little mini-gitmo for everyone coming to america!
Re:ruling makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness---That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it,
Rights are not given to the people by the government, rights are natural, given by God (or nature). Governments are given rights by the people. People, however have natural rights given to them simply by being human. The right to oppose government and the right to not be subjected to unreasonable searches is a natural right, not a right given by government because the government has no authority to give or take away rights.
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That's all nice and well, but the Declaration of Independence has no basis in law, and never has.
Worse, however, is the fact that the Constitution has no legal weight either.
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Perhaps we just are overdue for a revolution and a rewrite of our constitution and government to one that properly secures rights, because this 200 some year old one isn't held in high enough regard anymore...
Reboot instead of rewrite (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck, I'd settle for a reboot instead of a rewrite, where the Constitution is put back in place as the actual legal foundation for anything in this country's legislation.
As things currently stand, there's so much awful unconstitutional cruft floating around that will likely never be cleared away...
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Ehh...not really that simple. The Declaration has some weight in US statutory law.