By: Victor

Victor — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:11:57 +0000

The border authorities will provide probable cause as needed, while they search a car without the owner present, so it is pointless to change this law without getting very specific about what constitutes probable cause.
But why are you worried about computers only when the same applies to your vehicle and your papers?
Now, as to computers, no legislator can stand up and say “Digital information has nothing to do with the border because all digital info can be emailed into the country any time at all, so searching for it on a physilcal machine are pointless and just holds up the line at the border.”
The reason they can’t say this is because someone jumps up and screams “what about child porn?” and everyone forgets that this can be emailed just as easily as a business plan or legislative brief. And then the whole discussion descends into “don’t get me wrongs” and “please, I’m the last one to defend…” crap because no one wants to be seen as supporting child porn.
If you can’t get the good old USA back to being BRAVE, that is, the home of the brave, you will never get the laws back to lofty constitutional standards and these cowardly provisions will continue to gut american and neighborly freedoms. Car searches need to be done in the presence of the owner and computers should only be searched insofar as the owner needs to be able to prove it’s a real computer and not, say, a stash for a kilo of cocaine.
Some 2000 people (not all american) died on 9/11 or .000007 (or 7/10,000 of one percent) of the population of 300,000,000. For this many more have died in the ensuing military actions of the last decade and hundreds of millions of border crossings of innocent americans and innocent non americans too, have been subject to incredibly invasive searches by border control freaks let loose by these laws.
I weep and rage in despair for us regular folk and our impotence to back down these legislating weasels these long ten years. Curious George has given the terrorists a gigantic win because by him america has presented that it is scared of its neighbors, while his incarnation of power-drunk border guards give the rest of us on this continent the figurative (and often literal) equivalent of the middle finger in a rubber glove.
The way things stand right now (america) your neighbors will visit you because they need you, but the blue line at your border by its behavior will generate unwarranted hatred of everyone by association.
What an unbelievable shame.

Comments on: Eliot Engel’s Border Search Reform Not Enacted

By: Victor