All Your Laptop Belong To Us

Just when do the brown shirts start entering your home? This is getting totally out of control, like for real. (yes that was satire).

Thanks to a decision from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S. Customs officials can now seize and copy the contents of any laptop carried across a U.S. border. There's no arrest, warrant or probable cause required-just a "gimme."

If you're a defense attorney, your most confidential client files may wind up in the hands of government prosecutors. If you're a political opponent of the Bush administration, your correspondence and the names and addresses of everyone you've contacted can now be used against you to support a "terror" investigation.

The ways that this new authority can be misused are too numerous to count. Basically whatever information you carry with you o­n your laptop including banking records, client data, you name it, now, in effect, must be shared with the U.S. government.

Read the whole story because there's good stuff in there about protecting yourself and your data.