Border Seizure: Is All Information Equal?

The New York Times reported that border guards have seized computers and searched hard drives. The auspices of such actions are based around the noble effort to stop the trafficking of child pornography into the country. The reference to two cases (supporting searches, blocking searches) about the same kinds of searches, the concern that I have in such cases is how a line is drawn between different kinds of data. If the government is allowed to take copies of the data on a hard drive, what is to distinguish between medical records or diary entries from child porn or calls to treason? On a hard drive they are all just zeros and ones and there in lies the difference between real and “intellectual” property. Perhaps one solution is technological (like the use of the carnivore (DCS 1000) email reading system that the NSA uses). Another option is to decide which is the more important liberty to our society. If we search all hard drives looking for illegal material and we find no illegal material but we do find information about a crime that was committed but unprosecuted, should the govt. be allowed to use that? What about the cost of the lost ability to be secure in your “papers” if such things are searchable? If we are not presented a technological solution then how do we draw this line and is this a bright line or one that changes with the times and other information? I personally question if such searches are worth the loss of liberty they provide. Carrying such data across borders is certainly less efficient than just copying it across the internet (Gmail account, LiveDrive, BitTorrent, Anonymous FTP, etc.) so the ability to transmit such data does not seem to me to be significantly impeded by such an action. On the flip side, the self-censorship that would be imposed by individuals who travel abroad based upon the knowledge that the government would have access to such data seems to have great ill effects on first and forth amendment protections. Likewise, the implications of such searches being used against political opponents (like that of Hoover’s FBI) or as a way to monitor US citizens should be something that we should not allow without eminent threat. How do we make decisions about such things in the current time is left to the courts but I think we should not tread recklessly on such tings as they are likely to set precedent for how digital data is perceived by the law in our world where all data is quickly becoming just ones and zeros.

If you are concerned about such searches, I suggest you check out encryption software, like TrueCrypt, and use it to create “virtual drives” that contain the files you would not want searched.