New legal challenge to DHS laptop searches at U.S. border
respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is filing the case on behalf of the plaintiffs, argues that laptops and smartphones, unlike a suitcase of clothes and toiletries, contain highly personal information, from financial records to family photos. The government should have a “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has been or is about to be committed before reviewing such information, the plaintiffs contend.
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said that once the lawsuit is filed, “we’ll review it and make a determination on how we’ll ultimately respond in court.”
Nakashima quotes ACLU attorney Catherine Crump to say this case may be more likely to succeed than previous challenges, which involved criminal defendants whose laptops contained child pornography. “The plaintiffs in our case are extremely sympathetic, and the harms they suffered are grave,” Crump said. “I’m optimistic that a judge seeing that will be more inclined to recognize that the Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion for searches that are this invasive.”
The plaintiffs are the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the National Press Photographers Association, and Pascal Abidor. Abidor, a 26-year-old doctoral student and dual U.S.-French citizen, was on an Amtrak train from Montreal to New York to visit family last spring when his laptop was searched and confiscated by CBP officers.
“I had no idea how this would end, what repercussions this would have on any aspect of my life,” Abidor told Nakashima. “Here my laptop and hard drive were taken away from me, after having done nothing. Having no control over what might happen to me, or over what the government might believe me to be up to, was extremely frightening.”
Nakashima writes that Abidor, whose focus is Islamic studies at Montreal’s McGill University, was stopped on 1 May at an inspection point at the border of Quebec and New York. A CBP officer who had examined Abidor’s two passports, which had visas for Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, asked to inspect his laptop.
Abidor’s research focuses on the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon, and his laptop contained pictures, downloaded from the Internet, including images of rallies by the militant Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Abidor was handcuffed and detained for three hours, and his laptop and a backup documents stored on his external hard drive were confiscated. The laptop and hard drive were returned to him eleven days later, after each of the files on the lap top and external drive was opened and examined.
Abidor is among 6,671 travelers whose laptops or other devices were searched between October 2008 and June 2010, according to the ACLU:
- Slightly less than half — 45 percent — were U.S. citizens
- 83 percent were male
- 52 percent identified as white
- 10 percent as black
- 9 percent as Asian
No category was provided for people of Middle Eastern descent.
The policy also permits agencies under certain circumstances to share the data found on travelers’ devices, which was done 282 times between July 2008 and July 2009, according to the ACLU.
