You'll recall that last year Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old doctoral student and dual U.S.-French citizen, was traveling back to Brooklyn from Montreal on an Amtrak train when a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer ordered him to turn on his laptop and enter his password so that his computer could be searched—during this time they kept Abidor in a cell before being releasing him without charge several hours later. (And without his computer.) The ACLU filed a lawsuit on his behalf, and Abidor says he fears the incident flagged him for life.
Abidor says two weeks later he went to Britain to visit his girlfriend, and when he came back he was searched and questioned for an hour at the Newark airport in New Jersey. "You could see the guy react as soon as he scanned my passport and the message came up," Abidor tells The Associated Press. "They went through everything, and asked the same questions: ’Are you Muslim, are you a convert, do you go to lectures?I have no control over who I am anymore. What I do with my life doesn’t matter. How I am perceived and how I want to be perceived are not connected anymore."
But responding to the lawsuit, the government insists border agents "are not subject to any requirement of reasonable suspicion, probable cause or warrant." And according to Homeland Security, computers are classified as "closed containers," and border agents are allowed to search them accordingly. According to the ACLU, they've searched them liberally—between October 2008 and June 2010, over 6,500 people traveling to and from the United States had their electronic devices searched at the border. Nearly half of these people were U.S. citizens like Abidor.
