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This is a guest post by Hugh Handeyside, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project, Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and Esha Bhandari, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. It was originally posted on the ACLU Speak Freely blog.
In September 2017, we, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the federal government for its warrantless and suspicionless searches of phones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry.
The government immediately tried to dismiss our case, arguing that the First and Fourth Amendments do not protect against such searches. But the court ruled that our clients — 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident whose phones and laptops were searched while returning to the United States — could move forward with their claims.
Since then, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have had to turn over documents and evidence about why and how they conduct warrantless and suspicionless searches of electronic devices at the border. And their officials have had to sit down with us to explain — under oath — their policies and practices governing such warrantless searches.
What we learned is alarming, and we're now back in court with this new evidence asking the judge to skip trial altogether and rule for our clients.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Friday May 03 2019, @07:58PM
Ummm, you may want to back off the TSA just a little. Having life-long friends in the TSA I can tell you the average mindset is that they don't really give a shit. You think they're happy about cupping my balls? No. They're not interested in violating people's privacy, but just doing the damn job to get their slave wage.
Maybe higher up in the TSA you have an anti-privacy mindset, but the average TSA worker in the terminals is just trying to get through the shift without an incident that spreads across viral media.
TSA isn't nearly the same as ICE and BP. For instance, my buddy isn't armed, nor does he have the authority to detain anyone, or shove his hand up their butts. Anytime there is a problem, somebody from local police is on site to take over. It's not the TSA rooting in your colon, but a local cop.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.