Border crossings with electronic devices

[Ben]:	Border crossings with electronic devices	Discuss This [1 comment so far] View Comments
The Washington Post has an interesting piece about US border crossings with laptops and cellphones. This brings up a few particularly interesting ideas. What would they do if you encrypted your data with a password that you would not know until you reached your destination (say, generated automatically and emailed at a given date)? Or alternatively encrypted with a PGP/GPG public key while the private key required for decryption is stored only at the endpoints of your trip? You would be incapable of complying with their demands to make the data available to them. Would they simply refuse to let you pass? Send you back to where you came from? I understand the argument that this might help them uncover and prosecute various crimes. However, so would mandating tracking collars for every human being, or allowing police to capriciously arrest and detain people without cause. Neither fit in with the concept of freedom that I advocate. Why do we even bother to have a Fourth Amendment any more? It's been used as legislative bumwad for so long that you can hardly make out the text through the feces. I suppose the same could be said for a number of other items in the Bill of Rights.