Customs and exercise

Indeed, more often than not they are rude, officious, peremptory and downright nasty. Certainly getting into and out of countries such as Iran, Egypt and the People's Republic of China is a much more pleasant experience than rocking up one more times at LAX or JFK airport to stand in interminable lines and be treated like a dog. The vagaries, inconsistencies and inflexibilities of the security systems in the US are simply astonishing.

It's has got a lot worse, of course, since 9/11 and one can and does sympathise with those few thousand staff whose immense and largely thankless task it is to maintain control over the tens of millions of people who enter and leave the US every year.

Thus we all have to accept that in these terrorist times we have routinely to take off belts, watches, jackets and shoes as we pass through security and also that laptop computers and communications devices are subject to search and investigation in exactly the same way as are the people who carry them.

But, glaring inconsistencies in the ways the regulations are interpreted and applied means that civil rights groups now find themselves in unlikely coalition with business organisations in their efforts to persuade legislators to place some sorts of limits on what the US border authorities can do with all the perfectly innocuous but potentially commercially sensitive data they download from innocent visitors computers and smart phones.

Business people often travel to the US with trade secrets and other confidential data stored on their various comms devices. It is a given that simply by the act of turning up at a US border point one tacitly agrees to be subject to and bound by the laws in force there, and that includes accepting that the content and data held on a laptop of a phone might be downloaded and examined by the powers that be.

However, there is growing concern about just what happens to all that information once it has been ripped off from the devices it was being carried on.

Now an alliance of concerned organisations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Business Travel Coalition  and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are petitioning the House Committee on Homeland Security to rein-in the perceived excesses in search and seizure practices indulged in by members of the Department of Homeland Security.

Recently, the US Appeals Court ruled that Customs and Border Protection staff have the right to search through the contents of electronic devices and seize information contained therein, even if they have no reason to suspect that the devices hold any illegal data.