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It's open season on laptops at the border.

Tuesday 23 January 2007 at 10:13 pm
There's been another disturbing development pertaining to the Forth Amendment recently, in that laptop computers may be seized for inspection without a warrant. This isn't the first time this has been in the news, but now a couple of precedents have been set in court, which is doubly worrisome; this was from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (United States v. Ziegler), and upholds statements in employment contracts that state that you have no privacy whatsoever if you're at work and using their equipment, and most of the time you don't have any privacy if you're using your own equipment, either. The thing about precedents is that they tend to be applied to everything under the sun, so long as someone can make a decent argument for it.

Note to self: Encrypting filesystems are good.

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eight comments recorded.

These kinds of things have really driven me away from wanting to visit the United States. I mean, reading about all these new laws and amendments, I’ve started to wonder what protects me from having my laptop confiscated or even me being shipped off to Guantanamo if I ever step into your country.

(This is me testing the comments, by the way.)

Adam - 24 01 07 - 07:57 - Reply to comment?

Some of us wonder the exact same thing: Writ of habeas corpus is what prevents citizens from being yanked off of the street and spirited away, let alone having their belongings confiscated for no good reason. Over the past few years we’ve been dealing with sneak-and-peek black ops to bug houses and offices, and compromise computers on the part of the FBI and wiretapping without a warrant.

(This is me testing comments upon comments, as well as comment notification.)

The Doctor (URL) - 25 01 07 - 08:17 - Reply to comment?

I don’t think they can even pronounce habeas corpus.

I wonder why the commenting’s not working. Maybe you’ve started a new thread instead of placing your comment below mine (in the tree)?

Adam - 25 01 07 - 19:23 - Reply to comment?

No, it doesn’t open a tree. My bad. Perhaps I haven’t turned on email notification before. But I have now, please try it.

Adam - 25 01 07 - 19:28 - Reply to comment?

I’m starting to doubt that, myself, and not just beause of the US public school system.

No, I hit the “Reply to comment?” link, all right. Just now, in fact. I think that comment threading isn’t active. I’ll mess around with it tonight.

The Doctor (URL) - 26 01 07 - 21:32 - Reply to comment?

Did e-mail notification work this time?

The Doctor (URL) - 26 01 07 - 21:33 - Reply to comment?

Okay, I got the notification for the second message, and didn’t for the first.
Also, I got the following link to go to in my message, FYI: http://testsite/pivot/entry.php?id=74
Finally, is there a “read more” or “read previous entries” button somewhere? I could not find this entry from the main page.

Adam - 27 01 07 - 03:25 - Reply to comment?

You have to specifically turn on the comment e-mail notification for a particular comment. Or, if you create a persistent comment account you can set that permanantly.

Yep, that’s normal.

To do that, you have to go to the archives using the menu bar on the left. I think there’s a way to hack that into the bottom of the frontpage template, I’ll play around with it and see if I can write one.

The Doctor (URL) - 28 01 07 - 15:52 - Reply to comment?


  
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