For months it’s been the policy (written or unwritten, no one is sure), that the Department of Homeland Security can do pretty much whatever it wants with your laptop, cell phone, or other electronic gadgets when you, a U.S. citizen, return to the country from overseas.
It’s understandable why they want our laptops: If you’re a terrorist, chances are you have the plans to destroy the world just sitting in your inbox, and the feds would like the chance to read them while you’re waiting in line at the airport. But going through multiple gigabytes of data takes time, and so DHS has filled its vaults with the laptops of the multitude, often sitting on them for months and years as they try to figure out what to do with the bounty.
Consumer rights groups haven’t exactly been thrilled with all the arbitrary searches and seizures, and for months they’ve been pressing for DHS to formalize and clarify the rules on what it can do. Check the DHS link for the clarification rules.
There’s some good news in the new rules: Customs finally recognizes that holding on to a laptop for a couple of years can greatly inconvenience the life of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves under suspicion, and is relaxing — a little — the rules about what it will do during a laptop seizure.
The big change is that it states owners should normally be present during any laptop search and that equipment should be returned quickly. But, as Ars Technica notes, there are numerous and vague exceptions to all of this, with exemptions granted for national security issues (why else would they search the laptop in the first place?) and for whatever “circumstances of the matter” the agency feels appropriate.
There are some basic rules for how long they can keep your laptop now, too, with Customs having up to 30 days to hold on to it, depending on which agency actually takes it. And as Ars also notes, “the standards for seizure remain very low.”
And so it goes. The new rules are really just policy guidelines, so exceptions will be legion and continued abuses are almost certain, but it’s good at least to have something on paper that we can complain about. Complaining about things may still be tilting at windmills — but at least now we don’t have to imagine the windmills.
