The American Civil Liberties Union has brought a legal action against unjustified confiscation and searches of corporate laptops by border police. The objective of the lawsuit is to provide the ACLU with the records of faultless searches and checks of travelers’ laptops executed by the US customs.

At present, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) perform numerous unreasonable checks of laptops and takes pictures of their hard drives even though they might have no justified suspicion as to their owner. Many international travelers were subject to and fell prey to having their laptops with private information scrutinized and seized by border officers for no reason, as put by Larry Schwartztol, the ACLU National Security Project staff attorney. The ACLU believes that this practice is a direct intrusion into the privacy of travelers, which is meant to be prevented by the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Many companies sending their employees and officials on business trips are disturbed with the practice of invasive laptop searches and do their best to prevent their commercial information from being retrieved and compromised by border police. For example, travel laptops that contain no sensitive information are provided to the travelling staff, or an FTP site is arranged for them to access the data after going through the border control. One of the most reliable and convenient protection means, however, is still disk encryption.

The ACLU first submitted a request for the search record data in June, but receiving no feedback forced it to start a proceeding. They believe that obtaining such information would contribute to establishing whether the actions of the border officials are justified in terms of the Constitution provisions.