Lawyers should leave their laptops at home when traveling abroad

Jim Calloway points out a trou­ble­some issue for trav­el­ing attorneys:

The Department of Homeland Security recently clar­i­fied its posi­tion to restate that if you cross the bor­der, any of your dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion devices can be seized and searched with­out the gov­ern­ment giv­ing you any rea­son what­so­ever. They did promise to try to return them in a more timely man­ner. This includes every­thing from a lap­top to an iPod to a USB flash drive. (Wow, won­der how many flash dri­ves are in the pock­ets of my lap­top bag now?)

via Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog: The Digital Lawyer Crosses the Border.

He goes on to pro­vide the fol­low­ing advice to any lawyer who may cross the U.S. bor­der with a lap­top poten­tially full of con­fi­den­tial client files:

That lap­top prob­a­bly can no longer travel across the U.S.border with you. Whether top mil­i­tary grade encryp­tion pro­tects your infor­ma­tion from the Department of Homeland secu­rity or just presents a pro­fes­sional chal­lenge for them is for you to decide.

via Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog: The Digital Lawyer Crosses the Border.

There has always been an excep­tion to search and seizure law at bor­der cross­ings. In the­ory, this is noth­ing new — attor­neys trav­el­ing with con­fi­den­tial paper files could also have them searched. But the ease of car­ry­ing vast num­bers of con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ments in elec­tronic form raises the bar on this.

And, as Calloway also points out, encryp­tion may or may not be suf­fi­cient to pro­tect your data from the U.S. gov­ern­ment. It might be bet­ter to limit what con­fi­den­tial data you have on your lap­top at all — Calloway rec­om­mends “tem­po­rary” net­books for the job instead of your reg­u­lar note­book. I think that’s not a bad idea at all.

But I still think you should encrypt any lap­top with con­fi­den­tial data too.

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• PCWorld: DHS Clarifies Laptop Border Crossing Rules (trishussey​.com)
• ACLU files law­suit on bor­der lap­top searches (infoworld​.com)
• Homeland Security Changes Laptop Search Policy (yro​.slash​dot​.org)