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Planning a vacation? Thinking about traveling outside the country?
If you
travel outside the United States, you can kiss your right to privacy,
and perhaps your laptop, digital camera and cell phone, goodbye.
With no
suspicion and no explanation, the U.S. government can seize your
laptop, cell phone, or PDA as you enter the United States and download
all your private information -- including your personal and business
documents, emails, phone calls, and web history. The Department of
Homeland Security confirms that this is the
official policy.
Tell
Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of
Homeland Security.
What
happens if you refuse to let the agents download your personal photos?
Or if you have encrypted your private information? Then Border Patrol
-- which is now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security -- can
simply copy your entire hard drive or even take your device and hang on
to it indefinitely.
Unfortunately,
seizing laptops and cameras at the border isn’t the only travel
security measure that infringes on our civil liberties.
Just last
month, the U.S. government's "terrorist watch list" surpassed one
million names and is growing by over twenty-thousand names per month.
The watch list includes the names of prominent people, like Senator Ted
Kennedy (D-MA), plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans --
many of them with common names like Robert Johnson and James Robinson. Your
name might be on the list, but there's no way to know for sure
until you are delayed -- or even detained for hours in a back room. If
you discover your name is on the list, it's nearly impossible to get
off. It actually took an Act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the
list. No joke. An Act of Congress.
These
abuses have something in common: They make all of us into suspects,
with no rule of law and no accountability.
Tell
Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of
Homeland Security.
It’s hard
to know what surveillance-state bureaucrats will come up with next. For
instance, many airports are using scanners that are so invasive that
they are like a virtual strip search! See-through body scanning
machines are capable of showing an image of a passenger's naked body.
Security measures like this are extremely intrusive -- and should only
be used when there is good cause to suspect that an individual is a
security risk.
And
recently, the TSA expressed interest in having every traveler wear an
"electro-muscular disruption" bracelet that airline personnel or
marshals could use to shock passengers into submission. Unless
something is done, this plan may not be as far-fetched as one would
think.
Tell
Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of
Homeland Security.
Traveling
shouldn’t mean checking your rights when you’re checking your luggage.
It’s time for some sanity when it comes to security. Please, speak out
now.
Caroline Fredrickson, Director
ACLU Washington Legislative Office
P.S. Many Americans don’t know about these travel abuses. Please
forward this email on to anyone you know who travels and ask them to
take action, too.
©
ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004
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