In a story the crew of Elite Tech News talked about last week EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) this week is calling for Congressional hearings on the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to search and seize electronic devices at American borders. Cute - but really does anyone believe that other than ordinary people coming home from business gathers or vacations are going to be victims of this move?

One would have to think that anyone conducting illegal activities; and who are net savvy as we are being told that the bad guys DHS is after is, that the last thing they would be doing is carrying a laptop with a hard drive full of incriminating information. After all with the proliferation of in the cloud data storage what would stop these bad guys from saving it all to the cloud - wiping their machines - cross the border - download their data.

As for cell phone perhaps someone should tell the DHS about the pay as you go mobile solutions. To think that anyone planning on blowing anything up would cross any border with a cell phone full of phone numbers of their evil buddies in far away lands is ludicrous.

I’m not suggesting that border security is anything short of useless in regards to stopping dedicated bad people wishing to cause destruction and mayhem but the idea that examining and / or seizing electronic devices is going to anything more than find some pirated music and some questionable holiday pictures is dreaming. Instead they will have unfettered access to personal data just because they don’t like your name or you might have a name that sounds similar to one on a list some where - and we all know how well that is working out.

As the EFF said in their press release on the situation

“Our computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices hold a vast amount of personal information like financial data, health histories, and personal emails and letters,” said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “In a free country, the government cannot have unlimited power to read, seize, and store this information without any oversight.”

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to release its policies and procedures for conducting these intrusive searches. EFF and the Asian Law Caucus have filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to obtain the information through the Freedom of Information Act.

“Your privacy could be at risk even if you don’t travel yourself. Your financial institution, your insurer, and other enterprises hold extensive personal data about you and your family,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. “If agents of those groups travel internationally, your information could be exposed to officials at the border or potentially copied and stored in government databases. Americans should know how and why electronic data is seized and kept by the government, and who is able to access it at the border and in the years afterwards.”

Yup .. I can see this working out really well - not.

Conversation Tags: security, search and seizure, DHS, EFF