The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) is advising its members that under U.S. law, government agents may confiscate and search a person´s laptop computer, computer discs, and other electronic media when that person arrives in the U.S. from abroad or departs from the U.S for a foreign country,” we knew from an official communication by the ACTE Executive Director, Susan Gurley.
A lot of troubles are really concerning business travellers and all those who cannot leave their laptop at home when moving by aircraft: the airline bomb alarm that happened in London last August forced a lot of limitations about the objects allowed aboard, but the crisis was partially solved through the use of pendrives or of those phones which have the double-function as “mobile/pocket PC”.
Last news from the United States, however, make us estimate that from now on it could become even more difficult to carry technology around: any person crossing US borders could have his or her laptop seized and analyzed by authorities… and not only lap tops: Flash drive devices , memory sticks, and Ipods containing any kind of personal information could be subjected to unmotivated inspection.
The reason is specified in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection official presentation on CBP web site : “their top priority is to keep terrorists and their weapons from entering the United States.”
The legality of this procedure is quite debated, anyway: according to a verdict issued last july “no convincing reason ,suspect or warrant is needed” to justify the confiscation and analysis of a PC’s content.
Actually, such judgement was issued in a case of children pornography, where random inspections of laptops have shown evidence of possession of child pornographic images on the hard drive of a traveller’s laptop, but in spite of the exact nature of this case, the sentence has been considered as a example for these measures’ supporters.
On a more up to date case, though, a Californian court lined that laptop inspections were a serious offensive on privacy. “People keep all sorts of personal data on computers,” the court said, dealing with diaries, personal letters, financial records, lawyers’ confidential client information and reporters’ notes on confidential sources. That court stated, in that specific case, that “the correct standard requires that any border search of the information stored on a person’s electronic storage device be based, at a minimum, on a reasonable suspicion”, the NY Times reported.
"The common idea is that there is a right to the privacy of one's computer. Yet it appears that there is none" commented Miss Gurley referring to the fact that the item of the argument is to determine an exception in custom laws to allow –under the “homeland security reasons” - those perquisitions that anywhere else in the country would be impossible to carry out.
“The issue is what happens to the proprietary business information that might be on a laptop. Is information copied? Is it returned? We understand that the U.S. government needs to protect its borders. But we want to have transparent information so business travellers know what to do. Should they leave business proprietary information at home?” Miss Gurley added.
The problem indeed is of primary significance for a variety of reasons: first of all such new events could have an effect on how international business is carried on, representing a drawback for economic stability. Then, it would be extremely restraining for private users as well: any device could be provisionally confiscated and scrutinized or subject to forensic analysis, with unnamed implications that is impossible to predict now.
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