Reading Slashdot, I came across a serious problem with air travel: the Dept. of Homeland Security may take your laptop "to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing".

They can copy your data and search for copyrighted or otherwise illicit material, and then press charges.  There are very weak protections for legitimate personal and business data, which might be compromised through copying without you knowing (they don't have to tell you what they did).

What do you think of this?  How might this influence how you travel?  Where is the line for protection against terrorists and has DoHS gone too far?

 
In answering my own questions: 1) it's a travesty and another massive violation of our civil rights, similar to the DoD's spying on 30 million Americans, 2) I'm now forced to leave my laptop behind or, at least, bring a "pure" laptop with no personal information on it (difficult to do!), 3) it seems like our government agencies have crossed the line many times before and sadly, here we go again.


 

Even leaving aside the civil liberties issues, this is just dumb policy. The real bad guys are too smart to get caught by this, and it's going to piss off a lot of business travelers who do not appreciate being presumed to be criminals and terrorists, and certainly don't relish the idea of Feds rifling through their digital laundry.

Putting on my futurist hat, it's policies like this that will accelerate momentum toward cloud computing. If all your data lives on a server, border searches aren't going to do any good.

...until those who provide server services to the majority of people begin capitulating to Big Brother (Google, Yahoo, ...)