Business Travelers Worrying About Border Laptop Searches

Business travelers are now worrying not just about losing their laptops, but also about having customs agents sifting through them or confiscating them for months to forensically test them, according to New York Times travel columnist Joe Sharkey.

27B last wrote about suspicionless searches of electronics at the border when a California judge ruled that agents had to have reasonable suspicion before they pawed through your computer. But that's still a district court decision and is not yet the law of the land, which worries business travelers.

Although much of the evidence for the confiscations remains anecdotal, it is a hot topic this week among more than a thousand corporate travel managers and travel industry officials meeting in Barcelona at a conference of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

Last week, an informal survey by the association, which has about 2,500 members worldwide, indicated that almost 90 percent of its members were not aware that U.S. customs officials have the authority to scrutinize the contents of travelers' laptops and even confiscate them for a period of time, without giving a reason. Appeals are under way in some confiscation cases, but the law is clear.

"They don't need probable cause to perform these searches under the current law," said Tim Kane, a Washington lawyer who is researching the matter for corporate clients. "They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations."

There's more goodness and discussion of why the policy worries legitimate business travelers in the rest of Sharkey's story. And it's a miracle Sharkey got to write this story – if you haven't heard about how he nearly died in a mid-air plane collision, go and read his harrowing account here.

Original Photo: dmealiffe