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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