Judge rules Border INsecurity Agents can search your laptops, cell phones etc

Or maybe not if your name happens to be Hasan (check story below)

From Homeland Security News Wire:

Judge: Border agents can search laptops, storage media, cellphones

2 January 2014

A federal court on Tuesday said that a DHS policy which allows agents at border crossings to search laptops and other electronic devices belonging to U.S. citizens and foreigners is legal. Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old student at McGill University, charged that when he tried to enter the United States from Canada, DHS agents spent five hours searching his laptop and USB drives. They then demanded that he write down his passwords and hand over the laptop and storage media. The judge noted that Abidor told officers he was living in Canada, but that he did not tell the agents that he held both U.S. and French passports, and initially did not produce the passport containing visas from Lebanon and Jordan, thus giving the appearance that he was trying to hide the fact that he had visited these two countries. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman of the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York ruled in a 32-page decision that the U.S. government had reasonable suspicion to investigate due to a combination of several factors, including witholding information about his visas. “The agents certainly had reasonable suspicion supporting further inspection of Abidor’s electronic devices,” the judge wrote....

  Yes, there is more, with background, here.

 More security related :

Judge rules NSA’s collection of telephony metadata is legal

Published 30 December 2013

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the collection of large amounts of phone metadata by the National Security Agency (NSA) is legal. The decision by Judge William H. Pauley III in New York adds yet another legal interpretation to an increasingly contentious debate over the legality of the NSA collection programs. In just eleven days, two judges and a presidential review panel reached significantly different conclusions about key issues related to the NSA surveillance program, among them the intelligence value of the data the program collects, the privacy interests – and expectations — at stake, and the constitutionality of the program in its present form....

The rest is here. 

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