Homeland Security - what's next?

The paranoia continues. I mean, I am all for protecting a country, its people and all the rest, but apparently the US Department of Homeland Security and its ability to screen travellers just went up a notch. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives just issued a statement that highlights the details about those regulations at the US border. As if fingerprinting and photographing every US visitor wasn't enough, it's now apparently possible to seize computers, memory sticks, phones, and basically all data on any device brought into the country.

I don't believe the US Customs officials mean that my memory stick is a weapon (although I could poke someone with it) or I could knock someone down with my corporate laptop. But if that's not the problem, it's clearly only about the data getting into the country. Bad data, that is. Then again, has someone in the US administration ever heard of the .... uh... Internet? Didn't Al Gore invent the whole thing? Reminds me of the old joke where border officials worldwide were searching for CDROMs in travellers' bags to prevent the use and spreading of pirated software. They quickly learned that if someone wanted any data to travel across borders, without any border patrol, they would simply use an email or ftp the data to any place in the world.

So, if the memory stick is not the threat, the data is, but only on devices brought physically into the country, what could it be that the customs officials are after? Not the pictures of Uncle Henry's birthday party, that's pretty obvious. Well, maybe it's all about exactly that corporate data that everyone carries around. In other words, a way to enable legalized industrial espoinage. So much for the common conspiracy theory, but in any case: Nice move, boys, sounds like a golden opportunity for vendors of encryption software.