Do US Customs agents confiscate computers and phones at airports?

The Wash­ing­ton Post reported yes­ter­day on alle­ga­tions that US Cus­toms agents have inspected and con­fis­cated lap­top com­put­ers, iPods, and mobile phones dur­ing pas­sen­ger inspec­tions. Pas­sen­gers claim they were asked to pro­vide pass­words and open files. In some cases, mobile phones were inspected and returned with purged call logs. One per­son claims their lap­top has been held for an over a year.

Accord­ing to this arti­cle, the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and the Asian Law Cau­cus have filed a civil law­suit against the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment, based on 20 com­plaints from North­ern Cal­i­for­nia res­i­dents. The goal is dis­clo­sure of the US government’s boder search poli­cies. One sourse of con­cern is an appar­ent pat­tern of racial pro­fil­ing, in which agents tar­geted Asian and Mus­lim passengers.

The US Depart­ment of Jus­tice asserts that elec­tronic equip­ment falls into the same cat­e­gory as a brief­case, and may be searched and con­fis­cated for inspection.

How­ever, the sce­nar­ios described in this arti­cle sound more like coer­cion or out-and-out robbery.

Of course, many cor­po­rate trav­el­ers have con­fi­den­tial or pri­vate infor­ma­tion on their com­put­ers and phones. The Post arti­cle cites a Cana­dian law firm that sends cor­po­rate trav­el­ers headed to the United States with “empty hard dri­ves”. There’s an oper­at­ing sys­tem and a web browser on the lap­top, of course, but employ­ees access their email and doc­u­ments through a secure Inter­net con­nec­tion such as a vir­tual pri­vate net­work (VPN). This helps keep con­fi­den­tial data off the drive, as the law firm fears dis­cov­ery by search more than a hacked Inter­net connection.

Boing­Bo­ing and the Con­sumerist each had arti­cles about the Post report, although both blogs misiden­ti­fied US Cus­toms as the TSA.

Sadly, the activ­i­ties alleged in this law­suit do not sur­prise me. Busi­ness­Week recently reported on Indian IT out­sourc­ing firms that have sys­tem­at­i­cally under­paid IT work­ers who were brought to the United States on H1-B visas. These work­ers make tempt­ing tar­gets, as their out­sourc­ing com­pa­nies can send the work­ers back home for any rea­son. By the time some work­ers deter­mined they would never get their back-pay, they were no longer in the US. It seems that only a few lawyers or client com­pa­nies will step in to help these guest workers.

Tagged as: airport, Asia, browser, California, case, CIO, computer, content, data, email, Federal, government, hack, help, India, Internet, iPod, law, mobile, network, outsource, search, system, travel, virtual, VPN, Washington