Laptops fair game for airport customs searches

Customs agents at U.S. airports don’t need any evidence of wrongdoing to search the contents of passengers’ laptop computers, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

Reinstating child pornography evidence against a passenger at Los Angeles International Airport, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a computer is no different from a suitcase, a car or any other piece of property subject to search at an international border.

Although police need probable cause - specific evidence of criminal activity - to search someone on the street, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that no such evidence is necessary for a border search. Courts have also ruled that an international airport is the equivalent of a border.

Border agents would need grounds for suspicion before conducting a body search, but a “piece of property simply does not implicate the same dignity and privacy concerns as highly intrusive searches of the person,” the court said. Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain wrote the 3-0 decision.

Hopefully, when this makes it to the Supreme Court (and I’m sure it ultimately will), they’ll make the right decisions with regards to privacy.

It’s reasonable to ask someone to turn on their laptop to ensure that it’s not a bomb, but what reason could someone possibly have for looking at files stored on the computer without some sort of probable cause?

To me, despite the Ninth Circuit’s decision (which is surprising, since the Ninth Circuit is usually one of the more “liberal” Courts of Appeal), this smacks of a direct violation of a person’s Fourth Amendment rights.

For those that aren’t familiar, the Fourth Amendment states:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

In today’s age of electronics, I’d call a person’s laptop to effectively be “papers, and effects” … even if the defendant in this case is a pervert carrying child porn, the Customs officials should have never looked at the the files on the laptop without probable cause.

And nowhere, in any of the articles that I’ve found thus far, has there been any indication that this was the case. Instead, they’re claiming that “hey, we can open your luggage to make sure you’re not carrying drugs, so that means we can search all of your business and/or personal documents on your laptop at will as well.”

Talk about a slippery slope … once again I think that Blackstone’s Formulation should rule the day. As a reminder, Blackstone’s Formulation states, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”

Interesting bit of doping news at Competitor.com:

Landis Interested Observer as USADA Loses Doping Appeal

Floyd Landis and his legal term are looking closely at a decision made Dec. 14 in an arbitration hearing brought by American sprinter LaTasha Jenkins against the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). Jenkins had been sanctioned for using the anabolic steroid nandralone, but her appeal was successful.

The defeat was the first ever suffered by USADA, which had run its record to 36-0 in its previous case, the celebrated 2-1 arbitration decision this fall that allowed Landis to become the first champion in the 104-year history of the Tour de France to be stripped of his title.

The first arbitration defeat by the seven-year-old U.S. drug agency came when an arbitration panel ruled Jenkins’ positive doping test from a meet in Belgium in 2006 was flawed because the two European labs doing the testing violated international standards.

Perhaps, now that USADA has actually lost an arbitration due to sloppy lab work, they’ll be a little less gung-ho about pushing forward with other sanctions against riders when there is some semblance of doubt …

Once again, I’m reminded of Blackstone’s Formulation: it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Landis to appeal split decision ruling : Bike Biz

The three-man panel appointed by the US Anti Doping Authority to sit on the Floyd Landis hearing handed down a 2 to 1 decision against Landis on September 20th.

Both the majority decision and the dissent are available from the USADA website. Click on 2007. The majority decision is an 84-page PDF. The dissent is 26 pages.

The dissent by attorney Christopher Cambell, who has a long record of finding against athletes in doping hearings, was scathing of the anti-doping hearing procedures and severely critical of the Parisian drug-testing lab at the centre of the Landis case. The other two panel members were also critical of the French lab, throwing out the original screening tests, but deeming other results to be above board.

Regardless of whether or not Landis is actually guilty of doping, the fact remains that the system is fucked up, and the athletes are the ones getting screwed. Unless and until WADA and the IOC start holding their laboratories to the same high standards that a court would (at least, an American court, since I’m not as familiar with the justice systems in other nations), then there will always be questions.

Had this case been tried in a criminal court in the United States, it is very likely that Landis would have been found not guilty because there is certainly a reasonable doubt based on the inconsistencies in the lab reports. In a civil court, where preponderence of the evidence is the standard, the outcome is less clear, but on balance, if I were a juror, I would still find for Landis.

This doesn’t mean I think he is innocent; there is a vast difference between not guilty and innocent, but as Blackstone’s Formulation states, “it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”

If a guilty Landis ultimately manages to win his case, and forces change so that riders like Jason Sager and Bart Gillespie don’t have to deal with the bullshit they endured within the past couple of years, then it’s worth it.

Unfortunately, USADA and WADA seem to prefer Bismarck’s Complement, which states that “it is better that ten innocent men suffer, than that one guilty man escape.”