Sunday, July 20, 2008: 2:00 pm (Turing): U.S. customs agents have begun randomly searching the contents of laptops carried by individuals across U.S. border checkpoints. Personal laptops contain increasingly vast and intimate collections of information about their owners, and cannot be easily sanitized for government inspection prior to travel. The privacy implications of this policy are obviously tremendous. There is presently a debate in the U.S. court system about the constitutionality of these searches. This talk will cover the developments so far, explaining (and criticizing) the basic legal framework in which this debate is occurring as well as the reasoning employed by the courts that have heard this issue. Related topics will also be discussed, such as recent controversy over the Fifth Amendment right to refuse to reveal an encryption password to the police and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Attendees will be armed with a deeper understanding of these present threats to our fundamental rights.

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