U.S. Customs Violating The Constitution Daily

Here is something very disconcerting that I just learned of:

The Baltimore Sun reports that U. S. Customs officials are routinely seizing 5-10% of the laptops brought back into the country by U. S. citizens returning home after international travel.  There's no warrant or reasonable suspicion required, just a program to randomly expropriate laptops and keep them for 2 weeks or longer for "random inspection of electronic media."  The "program," in effect for the last few years, is also being applied to digital cameras, cell phones and PDAs.

I think Senator Feingold (D-Rockstar) hit the nail on the head during a Senate Judiciary Committee (Subcommittee on the Constitution) hearing last week:

"If you asked [U.S. residents] whether the government has a right to open their laptops, read their documents and e-mails, look at their photographs, and examine the Web sites they have visited, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing, I think those same Americans would say that the government has absolutely no right to do that," said Feingold, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights. "And if you asked him whether that actually happens, they would say, 'not in the United States of America.'"

Can you believe that? The government apparently thinks it has the legal right to search your most private information without any probable cause? I know our civil liberties and Constitutional rights have gone down the shitter over the last 8 years, but this is so blatantly unconstitutional that I would have thought it impossible in the United States. But apparently not. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, part of the original Bill of Rights, clearly states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

You couldn't make that any clearer without the drafters putting the word "laptop" directly in the text. The Constitution is unambiguous, that the security against unreasonable searches (without probable cause and a warrant) of personal papers and effects ("laptop") shall not be violated. And yet they get away with it, being able to examine all of your documents, pictures, videos, emails, programs, web history, phone numbers, recent call history, everything, without any pretense of probable cause, and without a warrant of any kind. It is appalling. Worse yet, they can hold them for weeks (this would be the "unreasonable seizure" part), depriving you of your personal belongings, which you almost certainly need for business or personal use and would be extremely inconvenienced (or even fired) by having the government arbitrarily confiscate them for a couple weeks while they snoop through your personal life and most likely log it all into some giant domestic intelligence database. And god forbid they find a blog saved on your computer that is critical of the government, or anything they could even pretend was evidence of terrorism, then your ass it theirs. Don't believe it? People have been rotting at Guantanamo Bay and blacksites all over the planet for years on less evidence than an angry blog post.

I hope Feingold does something about this, as he is one of the few members of Congress that can truly be counted on to protect the Constitution. Please contact his office and urge him to do something about this, and contact your members of Congress as well. Such egregious violations of the Constitution cannot be allowed to stand, and unless we create a buzz about it, nothing will change.