NOW THEY'LL TAKE YOUR LAPTOP

By JAMES G. LAKELY September 6, 2008 -- NOW might be a good time to buy some FedEx stock. International travelers are sure to be shipping a lot of laptops on overnight delivery to avoid losing them for hours or weeks - thanks to the Department of Homeland Security's new confiscation policy. Congress recently forced the department to admit it has assumed authority to take an air traveler's laptop computer (or any other electronic device) to an undisclosed location for an unspecified time to check for suspicious files - even "absent individualized suspicion" of wrongdoing. We shouldn't be surprised to hear this about an agency that directs the transportation agency to frisk Scandinavian grandmas while screening for Islamic terrorists. Still, the policy plainly denies our basic personal freedoms. Modern business travelers carry vital documents and data on their laptops. DHS claims the authority to disrupt their access to that information for as long as it wishes, snoop around in that data and share it with other government agencies - all without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing. Civil-liberties groups report at least one case of DHS staffers confiscating a laptop for months. At the least, a thorough sweep of a laptop's data by border agents could take an hour or more. Have a business meeting to attend on a tight schedule? Too bad. Being "randomly" wanded and frisked at an airport-security checkpoint is bad enough, but at least the inconvenience is brief. But the new seizure policy essentially keeps law-abiding business travelers, with their entire professional lives on laptops, hostage to a government agency and prevents them from doing their jobs - again, all without a hint of probable cause. That's more than an annoyance: It's official theft of your ability to make a living. Plus, even trained computer snoopers sometimes slip, accidentally deleting files. To which bureaucrat do you go if DHS kills essential data? The obvious privacy concerns inherent in this policy are hardly assuaged by the department's promise to expunge any files it copies for inspection. The program evades any public oversight. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) says he'll soon introduce legislation requiring DHS to establish guidelines of "reasonable suspicion" for border searches of electronic equipment. Sounds good - except his bill would also prohibit profiling on the basis of race, religion or national origin. Good luck squaring that circle, senator. It was the feds' mindless random-search policies that birthed this blanket-right-to-seizure policy in the first place. Yes, terrorists use laptops to help plan and coordinate their murderous business, and we certainly need to stop them. But we also need to protect the personal and economic freedoms of law-abiding Americans. A sensible compromise would let DHS agents use their judgment, guided by common sense and experience in screening travelers - instead of obliging them to sweep up a broad swath of people from every major ethnic or religious subgroup in order to avoid charges of discrimination. That policy wastes everyone's time and money - inspectors', travelers' and taxpayers'. Combined with vigorous public oversight, such an approach might work. Meanwhile, international air travelers who want to protect their laptops, and their freedom, have a way around the minders: Get FedEx on the horn. James G. Lakely is managing editor of Infotech & Telecom News, a publication of the Heartland Institute in Chicago. jlakely@heartland.org