The updated rules also make agents better inform you about what's going on. It's worth noting the searches are not standard practice: the DHS says that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has dealt with over 220 million travelers over the last 10 months, but only 1000 laptops were searched in that time.

I guess I'm OK with them searching laptops at the border (in principle), but it's ridiculous if they don't need to suspect anything to do so. Especially when innocent folks can have the tool they use to make a living snatched away for 30 days. Supposedly it's the terrorism and kiddy porn stuff they're after. I hope so, because personally, I gotta have my Divx movie rips on long haul flights.

"Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States," DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a statement. "The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders."

It's still a huge invasion of privacy, and thankfully The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit for more information on the searches earlier this week. As many do, it believes the DHS policy violates the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure.

What do you think? Were you one of those 1000 searched since October last year?

[DHS via Wall Street Journal]

Update: Z Portal reiterates you don't have to fear border agents gawking at your junk: "The X-ray image generated does not create the detail that you describe because of the subjects' distance from the X-ray source and the movement of the vehicle through the X-ray beam. Additionally, the car is in the path of the X-ray beam so this also obscures the detail of the individual."

The first Z Portal is being set up at San Ysidro, a port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego. Anyone who's "referred for a secondary inspection" will drive through a giant car wash that's not really a car wash, but a Z Portal. If you don't trust Customs' assurances no one will see your private piercings, you can actually have a border agent drive it through.

The purpose of the portal, obviously, is to find smuggled weapons, drugs and illegal immigrants that'll took our jerbs, while taking less time and posing less of a risk to border agents. Hey, it's better than a cavity search. But you still might wanna leave your laptop at home. [CNN]

When the USPS and local police tracked him down and raided his place, they found they found 66 cameras, 31 laptops, jewelry, camera lenses, GPS devices and more. So yeah, how does a TSA screener systematically walk out of the airport with more gadgets than Best Buy—hell, with some gear you can't even buy there—without a single agent ever noticing? I guess if you ever check anything actually valuable, you might want avoid Newark (not that there aren't a million more reasons to avoid Newark). [Gadling via BoingBoing Photo: Flickr/Joel Franusic ]

The Act would require a court order to hold a notebook for more than a day, as well as limit when the government can keep, or god forbid, share your life's work of Star Trek slash fiction. Unfortunately, with Congress about to close up for the year, there's not too much of a shot this'll weave through the necessary goalposts to pass, so you'll want to continue leaving the most horrifying aspects of your imagination, line of work or sexual proclivities at home, at least until next year, when the bill is expected to come back at full strength. [Danger Room]

At least, that's what the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's lawsuit against the students, their professor and the university claims. They argue that the students actually ran afoul of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because one of the fare cards "constitutes a computer," and that because the MBTA works with the Department of Homeland Security, national security, yadda yadda. End result, the judge agreed and gagged the students for at least 10 days, so they couldn't give their talk (you can still check out the presentation here though). The students say that they believed the matter had been resolved before the restraining order was filed, and didn't realize that the MBTA wanted a full copy of the presentation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently repping the students, and says that the judge came to "a very, very wrong conclusion" and that the decision "has a tremendous chilling effect on sharing this sort of research. . . . And we intend to fight it with everything we've got." [Wired, WSJ, The Tech via Alley Insider]

I think there might be some sort of political and cultural commentary going on—something about the US and torture and calling it a thrill ride and people paying to see it at a carnival. Anyways! The artist who created the animatronic exhibit, Steve Powers, actually wanted to do a waterboarding exhibit with real people—he'd be waterboarded first, then perform it on a volunteer, who would do it to the next guy and so on. But pseudo-drowning robots is obviously safer, and maybe a touch less controversial—after all, do androids dream of electric freedom? [NYT via BoingBoing]