You will do what you are told. 4th Amendment be damned.
“Currently the CBP have the authority to conduct a ‘basic search’, which includes looking and scrolling through the device. “
Not according to the Constitution they don’t.
“The Patriot Act and its progeny are counter to the Constitution and unpatriotic.
Foreigners attempting to enter the U.S. don’t have Constitutional rights.
Couple of years back I sat through a technical presentation on the MIT campus where someone described the methods used by border agents to scan laptops and devices. Basically, in most situations there’s not enough time to look at everything (can only put so much data through a port per hour) so they get a representative sample of sectors on the disk and then look for a match with known footprints.
Say for instance there are child porn videos that are several gigabytes. The entire files don’t have to be downloaded and compared. The match of one sector (or portions of it) that is known to be within the file will cause the traveler to be flagged for further examination.
It won’t catch everything, but there is no such thing as infinite time to check every byte crossing the border.
So is that giant data storage warehouse in Utah!
I am not a lawyer, so if I’m mistaken, I apologize. You do not really have 4th Amendment rights when crossing the border, American citizen or not. Think about it, border agents can thoroughly search you and all your belongings without either probable cause or a warrant. They can strip you and your car down really just based on a ‘hunch’ or because they need practice.
I believe this is much older than the Patriot Act or the Constitution itself, which is one reason it is allowed.
You should be on your best behavior when dealing with border officers. I knew of a young woman who was buying leather purses in Mexico and selling them at her shop in Texas. Customs agents told her she’d have to pay import tax on the purses or let them be seized. She let the agents seize her purses and as she left, she flipped them off. Two days later they came and took her car, since it was involved in the attempted smuggling.
You are at the governments tender mercies when crossing any border.
Revealed? It’s been going on for years and has been known for years. Not exactly a revelation.
Why were they seized? Without knowing that this story makes no sense.