[privacy] U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices

[Blanchard_Michael at emc.com]

Unless they have a summons, there's no way I'm logging in and allowing them access to my or my companies computer systems.  They'd be in for a fight I'm afraid with me.  The first person I'd be on the phone with is our company lawyer.

 Mike B

Michael P. Blanchard 
Antivirus / Security Engineer, CISSP, GCIH, CCSA-NGX, MCSE
Office of Information Security & Risk Management 
EMC ² Corporation 
4400 Computer Dr. 
Westboro, MA 01580 


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Ferguson [mailto:fergdawg at netzero.net] 
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 3:06 PM
To: privacy at whitestar.linuxbox.org
Subject: [privacy] U.S. Agents Seize Travelers' Devices

Via The Washington Post.

[snip]

Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country
since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she
was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her
daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried
repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But
after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's
calls had been erased.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a
business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his
password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he
remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to
log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited,
said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity
for fear of calling attention to himself.

[snip]

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/06/AR200802060
4763.html

Also:

The Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed
suit today against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for
denying access to public records on the questioning and searches of
travelers at U.S. borders. Filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the
suit responds to growing complaints by U.S. citizens and immigrants of
excessive or repeated screenings by U.S. Customs and Border Protection
agents.

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/02/07

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
privacy at whitestar.linuxbox.org
http://www.whitestar.linuxbox.org/mailman/listinfo/privacy