MassPrivateIWashington, D. C. – Newly disclosed U.S. government files provide an inside look at the Homeland Security Department’s practice of seizing and searching electronic devices at the border without showing reasonable suspicion of a crime or getting a judge’s approval.
The documents published Monday describe the case of David House, a young computer programmer in Boston who had befriended Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the soldier convicted of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks. U.S. agents quietly waited for months for House to leave the country then seized his laptop, thumb drive, digital camera and cellphone when he re-entered the United States.
They held his laptop for weeks before returning it, acknowledging one year later that House had committed no crime and promising to destroy copies the government made of House’s personal data.
The government turned over the federal records to House as part of a legal settlement agreement after a two-year court battle with the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government on House’s behalf. The ACLU said the records suggest that federal investigators are using border crossings to investigate U.S. citizens in ways that would otherwise violate the Fourth Amendment.
DHS declined to discuss the case.
House volunteered with friends to set up an advocacy group they called the Bradley Manning Support Network, and he went to prison to visit Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning.
It was that summer that House quietly landed on a government watchlist used by immigrations and customs agents at the border. His file noted that the government was on the lookout for a second batch of classified documents Manning had reportedly shared with the group WikiLeaks but hadn’t made public yet. Border agents were told that House was “wanted for questioning” regarding the “leak of classified material.” They were given explicit instructions: If House attempted to cross the U.S. border, “secure digital media,” and “ID all companions.”
But if House had been wanted for questioning, why hadn’t federal agents gone back to his home in Boston? House said the Army, State Department and FBI had already interviewed him.
Instead, investigators monitored passenger flight records and waited for House to leave the country that November for a Mexico vacation with his girlfriend. When he returned, two agents were waiting for him, including one who specialized in computer forensics. They seized House’s laptop and detained his computer for seven weeks, giving the government enough time to try to copy every file and key stroke House had made since declaring himself a Manning supporter.
House and the ACLU are hoping his case will draw attention to the issue, and show how searching a suitcase is different than searching a computer.
“It was pretty clear to me I was being targeted for my visits to Manning (in prison) and my support for him,” said House, in an interview last week.
How Americans end up getting their laptops searched at the border still isn’t entirely clear.
The Homeland Security Department said it should be able to act on a hunch if someone seems suspicious. But agents also rely on a massive government-wide system called TECS, named after its predecessor the Treasury Enforcement Communications System.
Federal agencies, including the FBI and IRS, as well as Interpol, can feed TECS with information and flag travelers’ files.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/homeland-security-chelsea-manning_n_3896941.html
Are you of the opinion that the invasive Transportation Security Administration “pat downs” at airports are a violation of your constitutional rights? Wait until they start treating you the way they treat investigative journalists, writers, filmmakers and activists who question the many official conspiracy theories and non-conspiracy theories. The mass media is 99.9% controlled, but the corporatocracy cannot tolerate a few investigative journalists blowing the whistle.
One victim is Laura Poitras, an Oscar-and Emmy-nominated filmmaker and intrepid journalist, who spent years producing a trilogy of documentary films showing the loss of liberties around the world—and particularly in the United States—under the pretense of “the War on Terror.”
Her laptop, camera and cell phone are routinely seized and not returned for weeks. On several occasions, government agents seized her notebooks and copied them—violating her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. Time after time, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents have detained and interrogated her in foreign airports. They threatened her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents have met her plane at Newark Liberty International Airport, detained her and taken her to interrogation rooms. Each time this has happened in the past, Poitras—as a journalist—has taken notes. Her lawyer also advised her to keep notes of her interrogations in order to chronicle what is being done to her, to document the journalistic privileges she asserts and her express lack of consent and to obtain the names of the agents involved. Multiple CBP agents told the American journalist she was prohibited from taking notes on the ground that her “pen could be used as a weapon.”
This chilling treatment escalates, even though Poitras has never been accused of violating any law—and the DHS has been forced to admit that in six years they never found anything to justify their continuing abuse and harassment other than they didn’t like her expressing non-official viewpoints.
Our security is guaranteed by a free press. We have no security if free speech is repressed—especially by the big lie that it is being done in the name of national security.
http://americanfreepress.net/?p=3705
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http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/09/dhs-is-targeting-activists-at-border.html